HC Deb 08 July 1999 vol 334 cc1171-2
11. Dr. Stephen Ladyman (South Thanet)

What steps his Department is taking to ensure that people receiving jobseeker's allowance meet their responsibilities of looking for work and improving their employability. [88977]

The Minister for Employment, Welfare to Work and Equal Opportunities (Mr. Andrew Smith)

Everyone receiving the jobseeker's allowance signs an agreement on the steps that they will take to find a job. That is monitored fortnightly by the Employment Service. If people do not meet their responsibilities to be available for work and look for jobs, they can lose their benefits, but the overwhelming majority want jobs—and, under the present Government, more and more are obtaining jobs.

Dr. Ladyman

I thank my right hon. Friend for his answer, and commend his efforts to encourage people to find work. May I put it to him, however, that one of the barriers confronting unemployed people who are trying to improve their employability is the fact that so many of the training funds that are available are still focused on people who are already in work, or on employers and their new recruits, rather than on those who are out of work? That strategy is clearly inappropriate in areas of high unemployment such as my constituency. What does my right hon. Friend intend to do about this serious problem?

Mr. Smith

As we develop the new deal and implement the continuous improvement strategy, we shall involve employers to a greater extent in pre-employment training programmes. Training that is detached from workplace experience is far less effective than training in conjunction with a job or an opportunity for work experience. The evidence from the new deal shows that, as does all the evidence and evaluation of training for work. Employers such as Stagecoach who operate pre-employment training through the new deal are both finding a ready source of good recruits and helping many people who had given up on the prospect of getting a job back into the workplace.