HL Deb 28 November 1984 vol 457 cc913-7

3.55 p.m.

Debate resumed.

The Lord Bishop of Liverpool

My Lords, we come back to the short debate introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Balfour of Inchrye. I remind your Lordships of part of the wording of the Motion: To call attention to the needs of those unemployed whose prospects of further employment are slender due to age and changes of economic conditions of trade". Those noble Lords who have spoken so far have confined themselves to the older unemployed. It perhaps shows where I come from that it never occurred to me, reading those words, that there was any suggestion that this was something about only the older unemployed.

There are areas and definable groups of people which are very sharply excluded from opportunities of employment. The noble Lord, Lord Balfour of Inchrye, said, if I heard him right, that 40 per cent. of those unemployed for five years or more—and I do not know those figures—are over 50. That would suggest that 60 per cent. are under 50 and that some of them might be quite young people whose prospects of employment are very slender.

Our greater efficiency and national competitiveness, which I readily say is vital to our national life, is being bought at a very great cost. We see that cost in the waste of individual talents, in the stress on families and on children, in the alienation of whole groups from feeling that they have any stake in the affluent consumer society which all-pervasive advertising proclaims to be the right of normal British people. That alienation is the seed bed for apathy, for a great deal of ill-health, for drug abuse—newly- and fast-growing on Merseyside—and for destructive militancy. It is destroying the sense of fellowship and companionship of our nation.

We must include some young people among those whose propects are slender. One of our clergy, who spent the whole of his years of ministry in Kirkby until this year, told me when, in his opinion, large-scale unemployment suddenly hit Kirkby. It was when the Labour Government introduced selective employment tax—was it in 1966? The recently arrived firms on Kirkby industrial estate immediately shook out all the labour that was not absolutely essential and hundreds of teenagers were on the streets, unemployed. That level of unemployment in Kirkby has never been reduced. In recent years it has of course grown much bigger.

That account suggests what "long-term" means in Kirkby. A 17-year-old in 1966 is a 35-year-old in 1984. Many such people have never had serious opportunity to find regular work and their children are now leaving school. For the last three years the proportion of Kirkby school-leavers obtaining employment has been about 8 per cent. Would your Lordships tolerate that if your children or grandchildren were in such a position?

Of course, there are figures that are very much worse in some of the inner areas, such as Liverpool 8. The inner area study—the most careful inquiry ever made into our cities—was being conducted when I went to Liverpool in 1975. There were then in Liverpool 8 wards with 54 per cent. overall unemployment. I have in my study a working party report from 1939 of a study of 200 black heads of household in Liverpool 8. The unemployment rate was 74 per cent.

There are sections of our population who have never had opportunity for regular work. Many comfort themselves that it is not as bad as the figures suggest. "There are three times more vacancies than there are published" say the Government. "There is a thriving black economy" say many. Let me examine briefly these two comfortable words. In Merseyside in September the number of vacancies published at Jobcentres was 4,086. Let us say there may have been three times as many vacancies and call it 12,000. The number of those claiming benefit in September was 140,000. Of those, 70,000 have been unemployed for over a year.

So far as the black economy is concerned, people have assumed that they know that the unemployed benefit from it. However, such an assumption does not have evidence to support it. No doubt there are some small-scale pieces of earning which unemployed people do, but to earn the good money which the language about thriving black economies stresses you need to have your own tools, your own transport. Professor Ray Pahl has shown, in some very recent studies, that those who really benefit from the black economy are substantially those in work doing a second job, moonlighting—not much comfort to be found there.

A woman in Kirby told a group of us that her husband had been out of work for 10 years. "He is a very talented man", she said, "but he needs money to put his talents to use". The Family Service Unit has an unemployed men's group in Liverpool. As the noble Lord said, how important are the voluntary movements at some of these points. The worker who supports that group finished his report very recently like this: The image that stays with me is that of five men either stood deep in thought or wandering slowly between deserted wharves and warehouses in Liverpool's dockland. They seem to be reflecting on the human waste and despair that the surroundings represent, and also at the waste and occasional despair in their own lives. One of them expressed his gratitude for that group to which he belonged. All of them, he said, have not broken down again or been back on the psychiatrist's couch". But, make no mistake, ill health, physical and mental, is marked in the high unemployment areas. What is it like to grow up in this part of Britain? A head teacher told me on Sunday that the children in her school were talking about what they were going to have for Christmas. "I am going to have a computer", said one. What effect would that have on John, whose father has been out of work for two years? The answer is that John tells fibs: "I am going to have a computer and a bicycle", he said.

I talked about alienation with its dangerous effects. The managing director of a company which closed in Merseyside told me he believed that his workforce were good people. He blamed half a dozen militants for leading them into militancy. But we must ask what made it possible for six people to lead thousands of good people by the nose. What was the seedbed for that militancy? How can the difficult process of slimming down take place in parts of industry without disruption if the alternative is mass unemployment? It must be the most urgent priority for Her Majesty's Government to set about restoring the sense of fellowship in this nation.

May I quote some words from Lesslie Newbigin, moderator in the United Reformed Church, for many years bishop in the Church of South India. He delivered the other day the Bishop Gore Memorial Lecture in Westminster Abbey. It was on "The Welfare State—A Christian Perspective". He asked what Jesus meant when He said, "Blessed are you poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God". He said: When I used to spend time with people in the slums of Madras or the beggars' home in Madurai, I always felt that I understood those words and needed no further explanation. There is a kind of richness in a place like that, and a kind of poverty in our so affluent suburbs. Is not Jesus saying that these have an actual share now in the blessedness of God's reign, a share which the rich have missed? It is hard to see otherwise what these words mean. And the practical outcome must be companionship: we who are rich must share the bread and so share the blessing". I think we must ask why we are having yet another debate on unemployment, for we know the figures. Ought we to go on wringing our hands? Last Sunday had a traditional name in the Church of England's Book of Common Prayer; it was "Stir up Sunday" —the Sunday next before Advent, before the Church's new year begins. The words "Stir up Sunday" come from the Collect which says, Stir up, O Lord…the wills of thy faithful people". We all know there is an urgent need to tackle the most damaging situation wasting human resources, destroying that sense of companionship in our nation. Do we really not have the political will stirred up to change our way?

From where I live and work I believe we must put away the slogan which says, "There is no alternative". There are several alternatives. Each of them is costly. They might quite properly mean the better off paying more taxes or not receiving cuts in their taxation. What we now know is that the present way is too costly for the good of the nation to continue. I have stressed the long-term human cost and the urgency of action. If the Government are to restore that sense of companionship in this nation—and we have much more violent examples of the breakdown of that than I have talked about—they must reach out with practical and large-scale policies, which will reach the unemployed urgently, for action today.

A much needed programme of public works and of public service would provide real jobs. I chair the area Manpower Board for Merseyside of the Manpower Services Commission. I have done it for seven years. I know that we could create real jobs in the service of the community if the 12-month limits were removed. I know that we could treble the Community Programme if the resources were made available. But the evidence is that MSC strategy is being directed less to areas of the greatest need.

There is a current phrase in government departments which is very influential: it is. "output measurement". That is appropriate in some kinds of work, but it is a very crude tool when it is applied to training. The adult training strategy of the MSC for programmes like TOPS, in which I saw some people of 55 years of age being trained in Liverpool the other day, emphasises people who are likely to get jobs in the areas where there are jobs to be found. That is the output measurement. Money this year has been clawed back from each region, from the employment division of the MSC, to give some more flexible reallocation. Instead of receiving priority treatment, the North-West lost over £2 million out of the £3 million clawed back from us. The North-East has lost, too. The money is being redirected where output measurement would show cost-effectiveness in putting people into jobs—in other words, into the South.

Very substantial cuts in manning the Jobcentres have been proposed. The first draft of those proposals included closing a full-time Jobcentre in Kirby. That was about output measurement as well because there are not so many jobs to be found. Energetic protests have meant that this and some other cuts have been pulled back but there are still heavy cuts proposed. It is said that it is no function of Jobcentres to provide tea and sympathy for the unemployed. All right, but it is crucial for the unemployed that Jobcentres are given enough resources to play their proper role as the gateway to special employment measures like the Community Programme, the Voluntary Projects Programme, Community Industry and the Enterprise Allowance Scheme.

I fear that public expenditure of 1985–86 is already established with no scope for further places on the Community Programme, which for us is a tiny little dent on the numbers of long-term unemployed that we have. If we are realistic about where jobs are likely to come from in the next 10 years for manual workers on Merseyside, Tyneside, Glasgow, Belfast, not to mention now the West Midlands, where do your Lordships really think those jobs are going to appear? For example, what three practical steps would you hope to be seeing in the next year? The matter is urgent. The long-term unemployed are already into a second generation. The good management of this country cannot afford to waste these precious national resources.