§ Mr. Cryerasked the Secretary of State for Employment if he is now in a position to answer the questions raised in the debate on the resolution to authorise expenditure on the temporary short-time working compensation scheme, Official Report, 22 March, columns 1627–56.
§ Mr. GoldingYes. I have today placed information in reply to those questions in the Library of the House.
§ Mr. Madelasked the Secretary of State for Employment what is his estimate of 808W the cost, in each financial year for which estimates are available, of the proposed scheme to provide compensation for short-time working; and what is his estimate of the numbers of people likely to be assisted in each of these financial years.
§ Mr. Golding, pursuant to his reply [Official Report, 3 April 1979; Vol. 965, c. 646], gave the following answer:
The temporary short-time working compensation scheme will come into operation on 1 April 1979. The estimated cost is about £75 million in 1979–80 and the same amount in 1980–81 in order to avoid approximately 55,000 redundancies being made. However, it is not possible to give an accurate estimate of the number of people who will work short-time in each of these financial years to avoid those redundancies being made, because the number of people who will work short-time to avoid those redundancies is likely to be more than the number of redundancies avoided, due to the varying circumstances, and the pattern of short-time working adopted in each establishment.