This amendment would place a direct responsibility on the Treasury, so I know that the Minister will respond to it creatively, positively and in the full recognition that we will expect him to fulfil all the obligations entered into.
We, of course, see the advantages of this initiative and we hope that it will encourage employers to take on more young people under the age of 21. We all know the difficulties that our society has undergone in recent years in terms of employment, and we all take pleasure in some welcome signs at last of an improvement in the employment statistics. But those improvements are up against a colossally difficult situation for young people. They have the right to expect, after they have been through their educational experience, at whatever level, that they are part of a society that ought to welcome them into gainful employment—but it presents a desperately bleak face at present.
We all know of the numbers of applications that people have to make, even for roles that are far from the massively competitive positions that we expect at graduate or postgraduate level. We are talking about school leavers who have to produce a cv dozens of times to make any kind of progress. Progress for most of the time, of course, is just the adjustment to rejection. We recognise that the Bill represents a contribution towards helping young people. We do not think that it is bold enough. It does not go far enough to tackle the great problems that we have with youth unemployment, but the situation will be greatly improved if we can measure progress. That is what the amendment would do. It would require a review to be undertaken on the effects of the policy on youth unemployment.
Of course, this is a probing amendment. I have no intention of taking it further, but I am asking the Minister to put on record as much as he can about the likely positive impact of this proposal. He will appreciate that we are concerned that many months will elapse before it starts to take effect. As I enumerated in discussing an earlier amendment, the Government’s record in this area is not good. They produced a policy that we severely criticised at the time and thought was destined to fail, but they seemed to take an inordinate amount of time to recognise that its failure had occurred. That is why the Government are in this position. On the national insurance contribution dimension to employment issues, these were wasted years and there is not much time left in the present Parliament for the Government to show real achievement.
We asked questions in the other place about crucial issues, but we did not feel that we got answers that totally satisfied us. On one question we got no answer at all: how will it be paid for? I would like the Minister to comment on that. It also raises the issue of how tight the timeframe is for employers. I recognise that they will have to move with some dispatch to take advantage of these proposals, but that is what the country is expecting. In circumstances of youth unemployment being in such a critical state, we are expecting employers and the Government to act with dispatch, and effectively.
Will the Minister comment on an aspect that was emphasised in the other place—namely, that we have to take care what demands we place on IT systems as regards the ability of receiving bodies to get their systems squared up, and of the Treasury to adjust to the new measure? The Treasury ought to be light on its feet in these terms. If it is slow, that may be occasioned by the number of disasters that have befallen other departments in this context—for which I am sure the Treasury disavows any responsibility. However, given that this policy is urgently needed, it ought to recognise that responses which blame the amount of time needed to get IT systems squared up look a little—I will not use the word “evasive”, as it is a pejorative term in the tax context, but they suggest that the Treasury is trying to excuse a lack of drive at the centre. I hope that the Minister will reassure me on that point.
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