Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has claimed that unemployment is less of a problem that some are suggesting and would be significantly lower if jobless workers were better matched to vacancies.
He told the Conservative spring conference in Cardiff yesterday that the Labour Party was wrong to say that the coalition government’s welfare revamp would fail because there were currently half a million vacancies in the economy. As a result, “it’s short-sighted to say there aren’t any jobs at the moment”, he said.
Duncan Smith’s statement came despite figures from the Office of National Statistics indicating that unemployment rose by 0.1% to 7.9% in the fourth quarter of last year. This means that 2.49 million people are currently out of work.
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development also forecast last month that unemployment would hit 9% or about 2.7 million this year, peaking at 9.5% in 2012.
But Duncan Smith said: “It’s not the absence of jobs that’s the problem. It’s the failure to match the unemployed to the jobs there are,” adding that Labour’s failure to help UK-born people find work had fuelled immigration.
“So who took all the new jobs? Over half of them went to foreign nationals,” he said. “This isn’t about immigration. It’s a simple question of supply and demand. We had a supply of labour – the unemployed. We had a demand for labour – all the new jobs. But we couldn’t match them up so we had to import people.”
As a result, the answer was to help the jobless become better able to take up vacancies by making work more profitable via welfare reform and by providing training and support to those facing significant barriers to returning to work, Duncan Smith said.
The Work and Pensions Secretary recently urged those looking for work to “get on the bus” and find a job further from home, echoing Norman Tebbit’s controversial instructions in the 1980s for the unemployed to get on their bikes.
2 Responses
You need to know what’s out there
Completely agree with Hazel. It’s incredibly hard to match yourself to a role if you don’t know what’s involved, even more so if you don’t know what roles exist in the first place! There are thousands of careers out there and it’s impossible for job seekers to have heard of them all (it’s even pretty difficult for careers advisors themselves to stay on top as new roles come into existence on a daily basis – who knew there are people whose title is ‘Dungeon Designer for World of Warcraft’?!?). Not only is it difficult for careers profesionals to stay on top, they shouldn’t be expectd to, unless we’re prepared for well over half of their working role to spent researching rather than giving front line advice and guidance. I’m the Operations Director at WYGU (When You Grow Up) which is a free social network for careers guidance and mentoring, designed to support both job seekers and career professionals in their roles. One of the key features is a self-assessment based job matching engine that works using a totally different set of principals to standard tests. Feedback has been fantastic and it’s opening people’s eye’s to real job possibilities they’d never even considered, enabling the career professionals to give far more specific and useful advice on how to get into a particular role. A successful candidate will alwyas be one who is actually suited to the role they’re in.
Matching people to jobs
Blame the DWP – or rather blame the government for reducing front-line staff – for the inability of people to match themselves to the jobs on display. As an Employment Adviser for some 17 years (on and off with some backroom duties) I know how difficult it can be for someone to find a job for themselves. Sometimes it takes an outsider to help someone accept the truth about their prospects, sometimes it takes intervention with a local employer but always it takes the human brain to match Mr/Ms A with the job. Self-service may work for some but never for all and rarely, in my experience, for the majority.