Tories would scrap New Deal
David Willetts, the Shadow Secretary for Work and Pensions, has said that the Conservatives would scrap the New Deal programme if they come to power.
The New Deal has been hailed by Labour as one of its flagship policies for encouraging young people into either work or training, but today Mr Willetts claimed it has let young people down.
Addressing the Conservative Party conference this morning, Mr Willets said that the scheme has left over one million young people neither studying nor training nor working. He said the Conservatives would replace it with a programme called Work First, which would put an end to “so-called training schemes which play such a cruel trick on the young unemployed by raising their hopes of a job only then to dash them again”.
“And we will sweep away the cumbersome bureaucracy of traditional Job Centres. Instead we will work with charities and commercial providers to transform the opportunities facing our young people.”
The attack on the New Deal, which has been previously trailed, came in a speech in which he promised to sort out Britain’s work and pensions “mess.”
He accused Labour of being “stuck in the past” on retirement, saying: “They don’t think older people can be independent. They do want to help pensioners, but they want pensioners to depend on them for that help. That is why they have got more pensioners on means-tested benefits than ever before.”
Mr Willetts promised to raise the basic state pension – without specifying by how much – and thus take one million pensioners off means testing inside the first parliament. The higher state pension would therefore gradually replace Labour’s pensions credit.
The Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary also attacked Labour for allegedly raiding £35 billion from pension funds during its time in office and overseeing the collapse of over 10,000 pension schemes. To help the 60,000 people who had lost their savings in pension scheme collapses, the Conservatives would rebuild their pension funds by taking the unclaimed assets of banks and building societies, he said.
Also on savings, he pledged new incentives for saving – including a lifetime savings account.
“‘In Britain today, it is so easy to borrow and so hard to save. We want to make saving as easy and flexible as borrowing,” he concluded.
