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ON THE RECORD
DAVID BLUNKETT INTERVIEW
RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION BBC-1 DATE: 5.4.98
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JOHN HUMPHRYS: Tomorrow, the government launches its
"new deal" for youngsters. They've already tried out pilot schemes, but now it
goes nationwide. From now on every person in Britain aged between eighteen and
twenty-five who's been out of work for six months or more will be offered some
sort of training and or work. It's a pretty complicated set-up. All of them
will join what is called the "gateway" for four months of training and advice
from a personal adviser. Then they'll be offered four options for another six
months before they're left to fend for themselves: they can either take a
subsidised job; work on an environmental task force or do voluntary work; or go
back into full-time education or training. The big idea behind all this is
that at the end of those ten months they will be fit for work as they've never
been before: they will be "employable" - that's the word. But it's costing a
lot of money - three and a half billion pounds, and the question is whether
it's actually necessary to spend all that to achieve that aim. The man in
charge of it all is David Blunkett.
Mr Blunkett, good morning to you-good
afternoon to you. Are you quite satisfied at this stage, knowing everything you
now know, that this is the best way to spend all that money?
DAVID BLUNKETT: I'm satisfied but I'm not complacent. I
believe, very strongly indeed, that we have got it right. That the twelve pilot
programmes that we launched in January have begun the task of getting young
people to believe in themselves, to have the social and educational skills to
be able to get a job and to have the optimism and hope that we took for granted
after the Second World War, when I was a child.
HUMPHRYS: But the reason I put the question to you
is that so many, as you well know, so many of those who when you came into
Office, didn't have a job. There were about a quarter of a million then, most
of those now do have a job. Most of those who are in this scheme, who are going
to go into this scheme, would have got a job anyway. And what I would suggest
to you, is that the poeple you should be most concerned about and concentrating
the real fire power and the real resources and the real money on, are those who
have been out of work for more than a year. Whether they are under twenty-five
or not.
BLUNKETT: Oh well there are a number of key
questions there. The first is that with a hundred and eighteen thousand young
people who have been out of work or education for more than six months, we owe
them an obligation to give them a start in life. But we owe it to ourselves as
well because if there are tens of thousands, and there are, of young people in
that position, they form the long-term unemployed of the future. So if we get
it right for them now, we can avoid the syndrome you've just described
occurring in the years to come.
Secondly, we owe it them in terms of the
social impact. What happens in our communities, often the most deprived, is
that these young people are aimless, they have no hope for tomorrow. They don't
build families in the way that we're expected to and therefore you have the
social disintegration. The third part of your question is yes, we do need to
address the needs of the long-term adult unemployed and we are going to. There
will be a programme from June, with a subsidy of seventy-five pounds and a
full-time education option for up to a year. But there'll also, from November,
be a new programme, with a hundred million pounds that the Chancellor allocated
in March, in the Budget in March, so that we can pilot the same kind of
programme for the over twenty-fives that we're actually implementing from
tomorrow for the under twenty-fives.
HUMPHRYS: But you are spending a fraction on them,
of what you are spending on the under twenty-fives, aren't you? About a tenth
in fact.
BLUNKETT: It is true that we are spending a very
large amount of the money on the under twenty-fives. The reason for that is
very simple. Firstly, to get it right now, so that we don't have to repeat it
for the future. Secondly, because you do need to spend the money if you are
going to have a quality programme. We could have a very thinly spread
programme, similar to the kind of measures that the previous government took
for all those who were unemployed for say more than a year. But you wouldn't
be providing the specialist advice and counselling service. You wouldn't be
providing the gateway for education and social skills, preparing those people
for work and you wouldn't have the education and training option for all the
programme. And that was the failure of the past government and that's why of
course, that we have so many long-term adult unemployed.
HUMPHRYS: Yeah, but I don't think you're taking my
point, you see, which is that most of those youngsters-I mean of course every
body agrees that the overall objective of this scheme is entirely laudable,
no-body would argue with that for a moment. Getting these kids into work is
absolutely vital. My point, one of my points, and I don't think you addressed
it there, is that so many of them, eighty per cent according to research work
that's been done and accepted by the Employment Select Committee, eighty per
cent of them, would get into work anyway. That's the point. And there is a
great deal of waste in this scheme, that's really what I am saying. Money being
spent unnecessarily that could be better spent on other things.
BLUNKETT: The ones that would get into work anyway
are being assisted into work. It's why we're taking the ones who have been
unemployed for more than six months, rather than starting it at an earlier
point. They need the facility often of the gateway to improve their social and
educational skills to get a job. And the pilot schemes have shown that
something like seventy per cent of the youngsters that have come out of the
gateway have got a job. Just under half of them have gone into unsubsided work.
That's fine with us, we've equipped them for the world of work without the
subsidy, without the special programme having to continue it. I think that is a
success and in some cases, we've helped them by very simple measures: enabling
them to get to work.
Tomorrow, I shall be able to announce
that the Association of Train Operators are going to join with us across the
country, building on the National Express and the Stage Coach programme and
local schemes across Britain, to subsidise the travel costs because in most
areas, not all, but in most areas, there are jobs available within and about an
hour's travel distance of the home of the youngster who is unemployed. So
there's a real opportunity here to put things together in a commonsense way, in
a manner that's not been undertaken before. It's precisely because these things
have not been undertaken before that we have a pool of long-term unemployed
who, if not helped and supported, become for themselves and their community, a
social disaster for the future.
HUMPHRYS: Come back to that in a minute. But just
on the subsidised travel thing. How long is that going to work. Will it stop
the moment they finish their ten months?
BLUNKETT: It's for the New Deal programme, it's
for the opportunity of being able to travel to the work or to the appointment
for work. It makes sense in those terms, obviously, if they get a job they
start to earn and when they earn they are on the same basis as other people, so
it's using a bit of immagination, being flexible. Because one of the
accusations of government in the past that Andrew Smith - who has done enormous
work on this as the Minister for Employment in my team, Gordon Brown and I are
clear about is, this has got to be something very different to what people have
experienced in the past.
HUMPHRYS: The other question you didn't address is
whether there is an easier way of getting those youngsters into work. Not all
of them, admittedly, but the majority of them again. Three weeks' training,
three weeks' subsidised employment, has been shown to give them that sort of
work habit. What you're doing is really a sledge hammer to crack a nut - that
is really the point I am trying to make.
BLUNKETT: Well, firstly, I don't accept that. I
think the more we can sustain employment through macro economic policy, then
the more of course we are dealing with youngsters who are 'up against it' and
many of them not in difficulty but actually needing that chance require a long
period of preparation to get back into work to ensure that they can get up in
the morning, that they can present themselves well, that their communication
skills are improved, and when they are in work their confidence builds. Now
you can't do that in three weeks and experience of the 1980s and the early '90s
with the plethora of different programmes and schemes that the Tories initiated
was that it didn't work for those particular youngsters. And if they are going
to get a job will get a job and that's fine and we can support people to do it,
the employment service for which I'm responsible places 1.7 million people a
year in unsubsidised jobs, that's part of their programme. They work with
employers, they help with recruitment. We've got to expand and develop that at
the same time as implementing this specialist programme for those who were
otherwise excluded and it's that exclusion from what we take for granted. But
when I was eighteen, John, five and a half thousand youngsters of this age
group were unemployed, even with the improvement in the economy and the massive
reduction in unemployment over the last year, there are still one hundred and
eighteen thousand currently.
HUMPHRYS: But I would still suggest to you that
you are not taking sufficiently seriously - compared with what you are doing
for these youngsters - the problem of the older, longer-term, long term,
unemployed, because one of the things ... let's assume that your scheme is
successful and all of these youngsters come out of there gung-ho and ready for
jobs, they will then take jobs that might otherwise have gone to those older,
long-term unemployed, because after all you are not creating new jobs as a
result of this scheme, are you?
BLUNKETT: Well, I think we are. You see, I think
the added value of this programme and in talking to employers - and there are
four thousand of them who have now signed up and there are something like a
further twenty thousand who have indicated an interest - in talking to them
they have said, look, we needed a little bit of support and help if we were
going to expand - this is particulary true of small businesses, we wanted to
develop and businesses either expand or die in the general economic climate,
therefore, getting the extra help and support with this employee, giving the
youngster the chance to actually gain education and training and there's one
day a week either on or off the job but for an accredited qualification is an
entirely new way of ensuring that we expand the employable labour market. Now
that doesn't just have an impact on the potential of the particular company to
expand it also ensures that our economy can expand with low inflation. In
other words, as the labour market tightens, we prepare more people to be able
to come in to jobs, equipped for jobs, trained for what is needed and by doing
so we allow ourselves greater growth with stability.
HUMPHRYS: Well, I think perhaps the key phrase
there is "as the labour market tightens", which it certainly is and which I'll
come back to in a minute, but let me suggest to you that what you are doing
here is producing in a sense a national solution for what is really a regional
problem and if you take Merseyside for instance, an enormous number of these
new dealers in that area - about seven times as many, according to the figures,
as there are actual job vacancies. Now, they're not going to be able to find
the jobs, quite simply because the jobs aren't there for them to find and you
can't create those jobs.
BLUNKETT: Well this is very interesting, both
practically and philosophically. This is the line that the Tory spokesman,
David Willetts who was once a free marketeer, is now taking and those who are
writing editorials or pamphlets about it appear to have done a double
somersault from free market for everything to old style intervention. Well
ours is a very different issue. Ours is that the money follows the unemployed
person and it will with the older unemployed as well as we develop the
programme, and therefore we do concentrate the resources where they are most
needed but we do so on the specific needs of that individual; and I mentioned a
moment ago about the transport travel - bus or train - where people can get on
the bus and in some cases get on their bike, because we've actually given
people a bike in rural areas as part of this scheme - the Norman Tebbit writ
large - they can actually get to a job. And in Merseyside, for instance, they
can travel into Lancashire and Greater Manchester, they can stop the
overheating of the North-West economy by being able to put their talents to
work.
HUMPHRYS: Well, they're going to get on their
bikes in Liverpool and cycle over to Manchester, are they? Or, they'll get a
coach or a train, perhaps and, then, come back again? That's not practical, is
it?
BLUNKETT: They're going to get-Well, no. They're
going to get on the train.
HUMPHRYS: Yeah, but, even that.
BLUNKETT: People in London take it for granted
that they commute in. In Inner London, there are people who need to commute
out into further parts of the South East, where there clearly is a potential
for skills and employment.....
HUMPHRYS: And, then, the subsidies stop. So,
then, what do they do? Because you've told us that those subsidies for travel
are going to stop. They're going to have to get the kind of job there, in
Manchester or wherever it happens to be that's going to pay them enough to be
able to travel from Merseyside very expensive on privatised railways, or
wherever it happens to be. It's not practical this, is it? It's sort of-kinda
like a commuters' charter for jobs that don't exist in their own area?
BLUNKETT: Well, I'm smiling, John. You're a
wonderful old, cynic and one of the great-
HUMPHRYS: I'm trying to be practical here!!!
BLUNKETT: One of the great diseases of Britain is
cynicism. It is possible for people to travel - they do it all the time. I
meet them all the time because I'm travelling a great deal, as Andrew Smith has
and we know that if they can get a job that is worthwhile, that offers them
prospects for training they'll take it and they will pay and employers often
will help them with the travel costs, particularly when it avoids the spiral of
wage inflation. And, I think, therefore, this is a key economic contributor to
helping us with the economy of the future, the stability and growth that Gordon
Brown is righly seeking, rather than something that is an irrelevance. Now,
clearly, where jobs don't exist we have to encourage and support through all
the other initiatives we're taking the development of enterprise in those
areas, which is why what John Prescott's doing - in terms of the regeneration
of the urban economy - is crucial. It's what we're doing with the development
of Health and Education public services. This is not a message of despair -
that somehow Merseyside hasn't got jobs, so there's nothing you can do, other
than put people on public works, which is a kind of 1930s situation.
HUMPHRYS: Oh, indeed, but-but that's-
BLUNKETT: Well, Sir David Willetts, going back to
the Thirties, I find very extremely amusing.
HUMPHRYS: Well, I'm not here to talk about Dave
Willetts. I'm here to talk about you and your campaign!
BLUNKETT: Well, you're following the line - that's
it!
HUMPHRYS: Being this terrible old cynic. No, I'm
just using a bit of common- trying to use a bit of commonsense and applying
to it!
You don't have to tell me. You're an
old Sheffield MP. I don't have to tell you how difficult it is to create jobs.
BLUNKETT: No. Not that old, by the way.
HUMPHRYS: Now, what-Oh, alright! Like me, then,
in that case. I was getting my own back.
Look, just as the-let me be a little bit
cynical again. Just as these youngsters - and, let's assume everything goes
really well and they come out employed but they're not going to be highly
skilled, let's remember, because after ten months you're not going to be highly
skilled, clearly. But, they're going to be - to use your word - 'employable'.
BLUNKETT: Yeah.
HUMPHRYS: Let's hope that they are.
But, they will be hitting the jobs
market, just as the economy you talked about - the macro-economic picture
yourself a while ago. Just as the economy is really beginning to tighten up,
possibly even going into recession, partly as a result of the very strong Pound
that we have. Now, you go along to the Chancellor, I understand, and you say
to him: Look, this Pound is really going to stuff British industry - to use a
technical expression. Do something about it. He says No Way!!
BLUNKETT: Well, he doesn't say No Way. He says
that the programme that we're developing - in particular, the new deal itself -
actually assists us in coping with the way in which economies shift. Now, the
whole task of the new Labour Government is to prevent the ups and downs - the
boom and bust that we saw in the past. And, the-
HUMPHRYS: The Pound's going up and down like a
fiddler's elbow!!
BLUNKETT: Well, the new deal- well, it isn't.
HUMPHRYS: Or going up! Going up and up and up!
But, it was down when you came in and now, it's going up!
BLUNKETT: Well, the Pound. A unique experience
for an incoming Labour Government to have as a challenge the rising Pound.
And, obviously, that is an issue that the Bank of England will be discussing
with the Monetary Policy Committee this coming week. However, the New Deal
programme itself helps us, firstly, to avoid the tightening of the economy to
the point where what you're describing takes place because we do broaden the
labour market and so will the programme for one parent families that is going
to be rolled out as well for now.
HUMPHRYS: You broaden the labour market but you
don't create jobs! And, there are going to be fewer jobs because of the
strength of the Pound. You, surely, can't be saying to these youngsters who
come off: Now, look we've done all this for you but from now on you're on your
own and you're in a market where in jobs in British industry are going to be
fewer and further between because of what-partly because of what the Pound is
doing. And, the strength it's doing is doing.
BLUNKETT: Yes, but why is the Pound strong?
Because, obviously, we want to ensure that we avoid inflation taking off and,
therefore, the situation we experience to ten years ago happening - where
inflation rocketed to over fifteen per cent. We want a situation where we can,
actually, ensure that there are people available to do the present jobs that
are, also, available and matching those two together is a key part of the new
deal. Now, if you do that and you're successful, then, you help in terms of
what Long- Medium and Longterm Interest Rates might be, the strength of the
Pound and, incidentally, the underlying Longterm Interest rate is at-is at an
all time low at the moment.
HUMPHRYS: Yeah. But, nonetheless, you must
concede, surely, that - and, other people might thing you were complacent
otherwise - certainly, these youngsters might - that this could - if we're
gonna see the kind of tidy-up. Goldmann Sachs predicts Unemployment rising for
the middle of the year - so do many other people. This could scupper the
scheme, couldn't it?
BLUNKETT: Well, no. To be honest, if it did and I
sincerely hope and believe that is won't, then, these are the youngsters that
need the new deal most of all because many of us are much more prepared and
able to cope and the social consequences, the generational Unemployment, the
passing from father to son, from mother to daughter, the hopelessness of not
believing that there's anything for them is something that is destroying and
has destroyed parts of our Inner Cities. And, I represent an area with one of
the highest levels of Unemployment in the country. I know one thing.
Unemployment, low educational expectation and achievement, low skills go hand
in hand because attracting Employment, attracting hi-tech information and
communication-
HUMPHRYS: Yeah.
BLUNKETT: -industries of the future requires us to
prepare people. And, it's chicken and egg. Get it right and you can develop
and expand your indigenous industry and you can attract from overseas the
investment needed. Get it wrong and they're not available.
HUMPHRYS: David-David Blunkett - youthful David
Blunkett - many thanks.
BLUNKETT: Thank you, John.
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