§ Mr. Ian Lloydasked the Secretary of State for Employment (1) whether he will now ask his medical advisers to make an estimate of the percentage of all registered unemployed people who are thought, for psychiatric and other reasons, to have poor prospects for employment;
(2) whether he will suggest to his medical advisers that, in preparing their estimate of the percentage of registered unemployed who are thought to have poor prospects for employment, they will examine the system and criteria employed by that department of the Finnish Government which produced the figure of 90,000 persons in that category in Finland recently published in The Times survey of that country.
§ Mr. Harold WalkerI see no useful purpose in preparing such an estimate. First, assessment of employment prospects is not purely a medical matter. Secondly, it is too imprecise a task to be capable of meaningful estimation. For example, when in June 1973 a Department of Employment survey assessed 30 per cent. of men on the register as having poor prospects because of age and physical or mental conditions, a follow-up survey disclosed that one-third of them had found employment by January 1974.