Lone Parent Employment

: I am happy to respond to that. The buzz that I put around my colleagues in the Conservative research department was that if we had sacked everyone in sight, we would just about have turned those figures—the decrease in the claimant count was that small. However, it is no part of my purpose today to belittle the Government's efforts, although I cannot call it the Government's creation of jobs, because they do not create jobs except through their own spending. Of course I welcome the fact that more people are in employment, but that is not directly attributable to the Government. It is subject to qualifications such as, for example, whether people are in full-time or part-time employment. I do not seek to make qualitative distinctions, only to say that people are not working as long. One can split up the activities in different ways. However, I persist in saying to the Minister that we are worried about whether the buoyancy that has characterised previous years will continue and about her Department's ability to secure the budget that will enable it to carry on intervening to meet those challenges. I now turn to the new deal for lone parents as it has operated to date and how it might progress. From the outset, our criticism of the schemes taken together and branded as the new deal centres not on their motivation—although that might be mixed in some respects—but on whether or not they have worked: their effectiveness. We are happy to embrace what we described in our recent election manifesto as"““Cost-effective schemes that work””," and we are happy to adopt active labour market policies. The House may recall our ““work first”” proposals, which drew on the experience of the Government's own employment zones and working neighbourhoods. I recall making a particularly constructive visit to Birmingham in the months leading up to the election. The schemes I saw there seemed to have worked rather better than the flagship policy of the new deal itself. Our ““work first”” proposals were based on what we regarded as cardinal principles: first, greater private and voluntary sector involvement, run on contract, with payment by results rather than for participation; secondly, greater flexibility for assistance tailored to the needs of the individual; and thirdly, a emphasis on jobs that last rather than the Government's revolving door into work, on to unemployment, back on to the programme and then round the houses again, which is slightly characteristic of the new deal. It is a small wonder, and the cardinal weakness of the new deal, that the targets—how new Labour loves targets—never measure or track employment sustained after 26 weeks, although we do know that even on the more simple issue of entry to employment at zero weeks after the programme only 55 per cent. of lone parents leave for employment in the first instance.