Fix job prospects in Yorkshire or face two decades of ill effects, shadow chancellor Anneliese Dodds warns

Speaking to The Yorkshire Post today after a virtual event meeting businesses in the region, Ms Dodds called on the government to look to Germany for inspiration on how to build employment into the recovery programme from coronavirus.

And she said the impetus was even more important in places like Yorkshire where young people were already less likely to succeed than their southern peers.

Ms Dodds said: “We need to have a longer term perspective on this.

“We know that if people become unemployed, particularly if they become unemployed when they're young, then they're much more likely to have far lower earnings for the rest of their lives.

“And obviously that reduces tax too at the end of the day as well as being very bad for them.”

She said businesses in the tourism and hospitality sector, which have been calling for a more flexible approach from the government to coronavirus support measures due to their individual circumstances, were a particular worry.

She said: “We're really concerned about the impact of current developments, the lack of engagement with that issue of unemployment, especially, and particularly, I think, looking at Yorkshire where you've got a lot of people who are or have been employed in those areas like tourism and hospitality, if you don't have that a more sectoral approach, then then we'll end up seeing higher levels of unemployment than we would otherwise.”

Richmondshire in North Yorkshire, which contains Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Richmond constituency, topped the list of areas most at risk for unemployment in a study in April, with its large tourism and hospitality sectors meaning 35 per cent of jobs are under threat.

While areas such as Hull, Barnsley, Doncaster were amongst the 10 places with the largest rise in unemployment in April, according to the Office for National Statistics.

And Ms Dodds said: “We need to be, for example, encouraging young people to stay in education and training for longer, that's a proven way to help keep at least some young people out of the pool of unemployment.

“But also other groups of workers, older workers who might find it really hard to get another job now.

“We don't need to reinvent the wheel on this, we had the Future Jobs Fund that operated before, and there are some pretty good examples of employers in Yorkshire who used it and deployed it to support young people back into work, gave them good quality opportunities, and we need to see government adopting that kind of approach.

“If we don't, it's going to cost all of us in the future.”

The Prime Minister this week announced an “opportunity guarantee” to help the economy cope with the “aftershock” of the coronavirus crisis.

He acknowledged that jobs which existed at the start of the pandemic may be lost forever but said the new guarantee would ensure placements or apprenticeships for young people.

Ms Dodds welcomed this but said it to be “meaningful” and also extend past apprenticeships to other opportunities too.

“We've seen the numbers of particularly low income young people able to access apprenticeships going down over recent years, we've seen quite large numbers of apprentices actually not able to continue with their apprenticeship because of this crisis, we need to be boosting them,” she said.

“But we do need to have something else there for those young people who wouldn't be able to access an apprenticeship or for whom it wouldn't be suitable, and this actually makes long term economic sense because we know that if young people have had that spell of unemployment, 20 years down the line their income is still suffering, and it's bad for them, it's bad for our economy overall, it's bad for the Exchequer because they're not able to pay as much tax as they would otherwise.”

She added reducing the disparity in spending between the North and the South would be a starting point, with Treasury figures showing investment per person in Yorkshire dropped from £879.90 in 2009/10 to £694 in 2018/19.

It means that the government is spending £185.90 less per person living in Yorkshire and the Humber than it is in London.

The PM has promised to level up the country and in a speech on Tuesday pledged his response to coronavirus would not be a return to the austerity that followed the financial crisis, but instead a stimulus package inspired by US president Franklin D Roosevelt, who led America out of the Great Depression with his New Deal in the 1930s.

Mr Johnson returned to the theme of his general election campaign, pledging to “level up” parts of the country that had been left behind while London and the South East prospered.

Ms Dodds said: “We have been saying to government, please look at what other countries are doing right now.

“There’s the German investment program, for example, the kind of capital investment, heavy parts of it, is 10 times as large as what Johnson was talking about yesterday, and it's particularly focused actually in Germany on job opportunities.

“I think that's the other aspect of this, that now we really need government to be focused on that investment, delivering those opportunities to people who need them. So we said with this investment is it going to involve reskilling of people who would otherwise be likely to be facing unemployment or are already unemployed? Is it going to be dealing with some of those regional imbalances?”

She added: “What we need now are measures being put into place to prevent additional unemployment, and help people who've become unemployed already. And we need to put them in place right now.”