Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 17 September 2020
No one should be under the illusion that we face anything less than a full-blown jobs crisis. The latest figures show that Scotland now has the highest unemployment rate anywhere in the UK. The rate here is 4.6 per cent—in England it is 4.1 per cent, in Wales it is 3.1 per cent and in Northern Ireland it is 2.9 per cent. Those are not just numbers. Real people are facing redundancy across Scotland—at Rolls-Royce, in the oil and gas sector, at our major city airports and on high streets up and down the country.
Every effort must be made to save jobs and get people back to work. I welcome Labour’s amendment, which is a positive addition to the debate, and I look forward to hearing more from Labour members as well as from other contributors.
The Scottish Government has made some welcome proposals to aid our economic recovery—for example, the Logan report on digital skills and infrastructure, “Scottish Technology Ecosystem Review”, which contains recommendations for immediate action and long-term strategic change. That long-term change will be needed to build resilience and opportunity in the employment market in order to mitigate a future crisis.
The same can be said of Benny Higgins’s report, “Towards a Robust, Resilient Wellbeing Economy for Scotland: Report of the Advisory Group on Economic Recovery”, which is focused on saving jobs and reducing inequality. The former is obviously of immediate concern, but tackling inequality is especially important over the long term, and will be crucial to building the resilience that I spoke of, and to ensuring equality of opportunity for all in respect of employment.
The Higgins report is also right to highlight the need to focus on the opportunities that are available to young people, because young people are bearing the brunt of job losses—not least, because many work in hard-hit sectors including hospitality, in which the pub trade alone could see as many as 12,500 jobs go. I therefore welcome the youth guarantee, as outlined in Sandy Begbie’s initial report, to help to ensure that young people are given targeted support. That support should be particularly tailored to smaller firms, given the fact that they, as the Federation of Small Businesses advises, account for 99.3 per cent of all private sector businesses. It would also be helpful if the various employment support schemes were better co-ordinated.
To aid the youth guarantee further, and in order to help as many young people as possible, it is vital that it complements the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s new £2 billion kick-start scheme for 16 to 24-year-olds who are most at risk of long-term unemployment. I was pleased to see that Sandy Begbie recommends that approach. I urge ministers to get behind the kick-start scheme, just as they got behind the chancellor’s coronavirus job retention scheme, which the Scottish National Party admitted is one of the best in the world. The Cabinet Secretary for Economy, Fair Work and Culture went as far as to say that the furlough scheme is a “lifeline”.