§ 31. Mr. BaileyTo ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer what assessment he has made of the impact of the measures in his Budget on unemployment rates in the UK. [154630]
§ Miss Melanie JohnsonAs the Government recently announced, claimant count unemployment has fallen below one million and is now at its lowest level since December 1975.
Moreover, up to December last year we had placed almost 280,000 young people into work, further building on our manifesto of moving 250,000 young people from welfare into work.
Some of the measures outlined in Budget 2001 seek to increase employment opportunity for all, aiming to get a higher proportion of people into work than ever before, by the end of the decade. The measures include:
Extending the new package of choices in the New Deal for Lone Parents to include help with starting up in self-employment, training, a new outreach service to attract more lone parents to the New Deal, and extra childcare support;Investing additional resources to tackle the problems facing claimants whose drug problems may be getting in the way of their finding a job, and provide more help for ex-users to move into work;Enhancing the New Deal and other programmes over the coming three years to focus on employer needs, the hardest to help and the most disadvantaged areas;
Increasing the National Minimum Wage for workers over 22 from £3.70 an hour to £4.10 an hour from October 2001 to make work pay; and
Increasing the childcare tax credit limits in the Working Families' Tax Credit and Disabled Person's Tax Credit from £100 to £135 a week for one child and from £150 to £200 a week for two or more children from June 2001 to help overcome barriers to work due to childcare costs.