Push on unemployment and poverty at heart of manifesto
Recently appointed Work and Pensions Secretary Alan Johnson has told delegates at Labour’s annual conference in Brighton today that poverty and unemployment should be at the heart of the Government’s bid for a third term in office.
Mr Johnson, who replaced Andrew Smith last month, said that poverty reduction had been one of the “least reported” aspects of the Government’s period in office, but one that had seen great success.
“We’ve already lifted 300,000 children above the poverty line as we move towards our goal of eradicating child poverty in a generation,” he said.
Tackling poverty, Mr Johnson went on, would continue alongside initiatives to get more people off benefit and into work. He accused the previous Conservative government of putting more children in poverty by putting more parents out of work.
“In Michael Howard’s two years as Employment Secretary more than a million people were added to the dole queue,” the Secretary of State claimed. “Whereas in Andrew Smith’s two years more than 400,000 jobs were created.”
Mr Johnson described the Labour government’s record on tackling unemployment as “spectacular”, quoting figures that showed the UK had more people in work than any other G7 nation and unemployment at a 30-year low.
He praised the New Deal as just one of the initiatives that had helped the government to deliver on his commitment to links work and skills. The New Deal, Mr Johnson claimed, had transformed the employment landscape enabling people to swap “welfare to work” for “welfare to career”.
The former union leader said that his department was aware of the threat posed by stress and other occupational health issues, announcing the establishment of a new task force to help the Government “better understand the pressures of work” and tackle illness before it forced people out of the workplace.
