Speech given by the Prime Minister at the Employment Summit in London, 12 January 2009
PM announces employment and training plans
Read the transcript:
Prime Minister:
Let me begin by adding my thanks to all of you for joining us this morning from every part of the country, from every sector of industry, employers, leaders in training, trade union leaders, people who are involved in the search, creation and the protection of jobs. And let me thank you for attending this important conference with the announcements that we are making today.
And I want to start also by thanking all those who have been involved in the new Local Employment Partnerships. I think all those employers and others who have given their time to make these work in so many different parts of the country deserve a special thanks. These partnerships involve every sector from manufacturing to retail and services. They are tailored to both the needs of the employer, matching the support to get a person ready to fill a role with an employer agreement for the employee to give that person a fair chance of filling the vacancy. Employers creating opportunities, government at all levels helping people into these opportunities in a sustainable way that is for the benefit of British business, for individuals, for the local community and for the economy as a whole.
And let me tell you what Local Employment Partnerships, with your help, have already achieved. In a short time more than 90,000 who were long term unemployed or were disadvantaged in the labour market have now moved into work. A 20 year old in Birmingham is one of them. He had been unemployed for 18 months after leaving school, he only had a few qualifications. He was helped by a Local Employment Partnership to start a work trial only two days after applying. Six months later he said – and this is his quote – “I can’t believe how much has changed from when I started looking for work. I enjoy my job. Since I started six months ago it shows that there are companies out there willing to give people like me a chance.” And that is one young man who could be speaking for 90,000 people and that is the power of what we can achieve working together, real help for people and for businesses when they need it. And that is why this time it is more important than ever to build on that partnership.
So let me encourage any employer who is yet to do so to sign up to Local Employment Partnerships.
And this working together is not simply about getting unemployed people a job, it is about investing in the skills and talents that both employers and employees need to compete sustainably in the global marketplace of the future.
Only a few minutes ago I met some of the graduates of Morrisons’ apprenticeship scheme. Morrisons have announced today that they are creating 5,000 new jobs across their business and they are launching a new Fresh Food Academy to offer a high quality route into skilled work, with support and training to achieve nationally recognised qualifications.
Now the context in which James Purnell, the Work and Pensions Secretary, John Denham, our Universities and Skills Secretary, and Peter Mandelson, our Business Secretary, are here with me and Leigh Lewis today, is very different from a few months ago when we first set out the proposals for Local Employment Partnerships. Every continent and every country is now confronting challenges that no-one has ever had to meet before, challenges that demand not just new policy programmes, but new ways of working together. And I think people will look back on these events of the last few months and say this is no ordinary downturn, it was not caused – like previous British recessions – by too much inflation, it is different because it is global and it is financial, it is different because of what has happened round the world to the banks. We are living through the first global financial crisis of this new global age and we have witnessed nothing less than a worldwide failure of the banking system, a failure that as we know began in America but spread across every major economy of the world.
Last week it was confirmed that the Euro area is officially in recession now. America has been in recession since November 2007, with more United States workers losing their jobs last year than in any year since World War II. And the latest forecast from the Congressional Budget Office predicts the US economy will contract by more than 2% in 2009 and that the US budget deficit will be over 8% of the national income, even before President-Elect Obama’s very substantial fiscal stimulus package.
Now our response to global financial failure has first of all to be global, rebuilding the world’s banking system. So my pledge to you is simple, we will act together with other world leaders to get banks and then businesses back on the move. But so too here at home we must act together to keep our country strong. While we are acutely aware of the global challenges we face, and these range not just from the financial turmoil, but climate change, energy security, the restructuring of industries, and we know these will require us to work together internationally to create global solutions, so we should also understand that this is a time when change will also bring new opportunities that are unprecedented.
Even with all the problems we face now, this is a world economy that - as China, India and the rest of Asia join the ranks of consumers as well as producers - will double in size over the next two decades.
And this means that for every firm that in Britain has a product to sell globally there could be twice as many opportunities. And round the world this expansion will over these two decades create as many as a billion new skilled jobs and it will be new jobs in environmental technologies, in digital industries, the creative sector, in advanced manufacturing, in healthcare and pharmaceuticals, in education itself, as well as in all the service sector industries around them. And I want Britain to be ready to seize these opportunities and secure a large share of this new global wealth.
So we are committed to giving real help to people now for immediate needs, but our plan is also that we know that the best and most enduring form of help is to give people the skills they will need and help them into the jobs that will be sustainable for the future.
Now we know that any action we take has costs, but the biggest cost of all would be the cost of doing nothing. Failure to act now and to do so in coordination with our international partners would mean a deeper and longer global recession, it would mean temporary rises in unemployment becoming permanent, it would mean, as in the past, whole communities written off and that would mean lasting damage to our economy and a bigger bill to pay in the future. This will not happen on my watch.
So we will do everything we can to prevent the global recession turning into a global depression, to prevent short term unemployment turning into long term unemployment, and to prevent losing your job meaning that you lose your home as well. And these are the lessons that we need to take from the experience of handling past downturns.
Today the number of long term unemployed is around 100,000. In the recessions of the 1980s and ‘90s it was more than one million. All our efforts must be to strive to prevent that from happening again.
So the first element of our plan is to rebuild the financial system; the second, is a plan that brings real help for businesses and people now, and that is why we have raised the pension, increased child benefit, cut VAT and lowered taxes by raising tax allowances, and we are making available a range of help to small businesses with more announcements to come later this week.
But as we are saying, the best form of real help now is investing in a stronger future, giving people the skills for the future by investing through the downturn to prepare for the upturn. Investing now to build a better future tomorrow.
And I believe there is no credible plan for getting out of this downturn that is not also a plan for building that better future, and there is no credible leader anywhere in the world who thinks anything different.
France has announced a 25 billion euro programme of measures to stimulate its economy; Germany, 32 billion euros with the prospect of more to come; President-elect Obama has set out his plan for a massive $800 billion fiscal stimulus in America, arguing, as other world leaders are doing, that only governments working with the private sector can provide the short term boost necessary to lift us from this global recession.
So that is why we say invest and not cut and that doing nothing doesn’t help. It hurts more today and worse still it harms us for the future if we do not invest. We say invest to extend real help now to those who lose their jobs, and to those people my message is very straightforward: we won’t give up on you, but in turn you must not give up on work, on skills or on training. But if we are going to deliver on these promises, as we must, then we must build on the partnership we are creating between business and government.
So if you look at the challenges facing us right now, there is so much we can do together. We are bringing forward our capital spending programmes, increasing public investment by £10 billion over the next two years. It will be its highest share ever of national income and that will bring the creation and protection of 100,000 jobs next year alone and help to keep builders, and plumbers and electricians, some of the unsung backbone of our British economy, in work.
And in the coming weeks we will set out further detailed plans for smart investment in the industries of the future, the industries in which Britain will be a global leader in the 21st century creating those products and services that we can sell to the world. And this will include a programme of investment in green jobs and the environment, investment in the new digital economy, and of course in infrastructure itself.
But today I want to announce, with our Ministers present, that we will intensify the support that we have been providing for individuals, with guarantees for young people and adults that will enable them to equip themselves best for the future.
Last week we announced our plan to create 35,000 additional apprenticeships, taking the total spending on apprenticeships next year to just under £1,000 million. Later this week, as part of our White Paper on New Opportunities, we will set out our September offer to school leavers whereby everyone is offered either a college place, an apprenticeship or learning at work and with it the opportunity to enhance their skills and their chances of getting on in life. For now more than ever is the time to invest in our young people, their skills and their talents in training them for the future, and we will not leave millions of young people to pay the price of a global recession in lost chances and years of hopelessness.
But we must today do more and everything we can to help those losing their jobs to find work again, and to find work quickly or to get a new skill, to maximise the chances of the unemployed getting jobs from the 500,000 vacancies that exist in the economy and the 10,000 new vacancies that are still being registered every working day. And we must in doing so maintain our labour market as fair and flexible. In other words we cannot always prevent people losing their last job, but we can help people get their next job so that the inevitable increase in short term unemployment is never again allowed to become the long term unemployment that scarred so many lives in communities in our past.
Now over the last 10 years by working together we have transformed available support to help people stay in work or return to work. And we have been replacing what used to be a one-size-fits-all world of benefits dependency with an active service where tailored support to help people back to work is matched by the obligation for people to do everything possible to help themselves. This fair and flexible labour market enables firms to adjust flexibly to new circumstances, but it prevents the good employers being undercut by the bad. Together the national minimum wage and tax credits have helped to make work pay, and they have ensured that the biggest increase in hourly earnings have been consummated among the low paid.
We have already increased the support available to those made unemployed from the first day of their claim so that everyone who has just lost their job will have access to more intensive help, including a skills training assessment, an advisor discretionary fund to help with immediate back to work expenses, and access to the new £100 million training and employment package that will help them immediately retrain and develop new skills. And there will also be greater support for those unemployed at three months with more extensive interview help, weekly signing on and directed job search.
And because we are determined to prevent short term unemployment leading to long term unemployment, with all its consequences, and because we know that the risk of long term unemployment increases as skills and confidence deteriorate, we are today setting out a new guarantee of intensive support for anyone still unemployed after six months, using £500 million that we set aside as part of our fiscal stimulus in the pre-budget report. From April, at six months, an unemployed man or woman can access a menu of tailored options: recruitment subsidies to help employers with the cost of taking on new people, because we are serious about working in partnership with you to help people back into work and we understand the challenging times you are facing; money and support to help people who want to start their own businesses or become self-employed because we have to develop the entrepreneurial spirit in the country; or where return still isn’t possible through these forms of support, work focused training to help people build their skills and talents that are the future life-blood of our competitive economy and will underpin the sustainable employment of the future.
And so in total we estimate that with this guarantee, and with the additional financial support that we are also announcing today, we will be able to help 500,000 people into work or work focused training over the next two years.
Now I believe that by acting together and working together we can help families and businesses through the downturn, and at the same time and by the same measures we can also secure our future competitiveness as a global economy. Real help now and real hope for the future, with the steps we are taking today, with the guarantees of support for young and old alike, with the public investment that this government is prepared to make. It is our determination that Britain can lead the world in showing what we can do to help those who become unemployed, and what we can also do to create the jobs of the future. And I believe we can do it working in partnership.
Britain works best when Britain works together and I believe that we can show this in the partnership to great jobs.
Thank you very much.
Chairman:
Prime Minister, thank you very much. And we now have an opportunity to put some questions to the Prime Minister. We are going to take questions in groups of three.
Question:
I think it is fair to say that we welcome all of the steps that have been taken, particularly the announcement last week in regard to apprentices, but there are just a number of points that I want to take the opportunity to raise with you. First of all in regard to redundancy pay there has been a manifesto commitment to increase and improve the redundancy pay situation and I think that will help people who are facing job losses in the coming months. And what we want to press you on is for government to make some improvement in regard to redundancy pay to assist, but also importantly, in regard to train to gain money, I note that there is some discussion about this and I believe it is very important that the government looks at loosening up the rules in regard to train to gain money to assist people who are likely to lose their jobs, rather than lose their jobs take part in training at their companies and that will help some of those companies out.
Just two other brief points, Gordon. One is small and medium size companies. We have written to the Chancellor to draw to his attention the fact that a number of banks are not being very helpful towards small and medium size companies. We have had examples of good small companies going to the wall or laying people off with skilled workers because the banks are not providing the assistance that they had previously agreed, or making different arrangements. Now in fairness, as I say Gordon, we have written to the Chancellor about that and gave him the specific examples.
And one final point. You mentioned at the end there British workers. In Unite we have a major problem with sub-contracting in the construction industry and we have got two examples and possibly another one where we have got sub-contractors building new power stations for the UK who are indicating they are not prepared to take on UK workers and they are prepared to take on sub-contracted workers from elsewhere in the EU. Now I know that this is an issue that Derek may have raised with you but I think this is something that you need to look at again. It is a major concern to our members who see their jobs being lost, they see these problems, new build for power stations happening and then we are told by these sub-contractors they are not going to take on UK workers and we want you to have a look at them.
Question:
Good Morning Gordon. I think what you put forward this morning is a real challenge to all of us to actually minimise the effects of the recession that we are all going through. Quite rightly as the General Secretary you are talking on the macro level, but the thing that interests me really is how do you take these issues forward so that we talk direct to employers about making sure that they are implemented? And I think it really is good that we do talk on this strategic level but I also think that there has got to be some work done on how we are involved in making sure that the agenda that you set out Gordon is actually implemented. And I will just speak to my own area, we talk about business but the public services are also affected. You talked about the investment but much of the investment will go into construction. And in many, if you take local government, there are vast shortages in many of our services, social services for example, massive shortages and we have all seen the problems there. But the Audit Commission itself, it is not just the trade unions, but the Audit Commission has estimated that in the care sector we need another 350,000 jobs over the next 10 years. Now what I would like to sit down with those people is to talk about how do we work to make sure that those 350,000 jobs come in and that people have the training to do the job and we can refocus people who are unemployed into the areas where we know that there are major shortages. And it will not happen unless something is done to put pressure on local government employers, on health employers to do the type of thing that Gordon mentioned.
And we talk about apprenticeships and I think there is a great future for apprenticeships, but will they expect the public services to be at the forefront of better employment around apprenticeships. But the public services are 40% lower capacity than the private sector. How do we sit down with local government and health and get them to do their duty and to actually employ apprentices, which they are not doing at the moment. And these are micro issues but there have got to be some means where these issues can be tackled on a joint basis, we have all got the same aims, we want people in work, we want the recession to be minimised, but unless we can sit down and raise these issues in a way that leads to a resolution, I think many employers will just go on the way that they are doing, you will find especially in public services short-termism. … Council have already listed compulsory redundancies and the various initiatives that we are talking about here will not get implemented.
So my question really is how do we move from the strategic debate about what we need to do to making sure that the employers and ourselves who talk to them get these things implemented? We need a plan, we need commitment from the very top within the government, but we also need commitment from the people who make the changes.
Question:
Firstly I would like to say that small businesses are critical to the economy in relation to the supply chain, but also we are losing them at the present time at about 86 a day, which is quite frightening. So I am very pleased Prime Minister for the proposals. You know we have submitted a five point plan for job retention and creation to you already, but there are a few things that I think we would like to emphasise as being important to small business. First of all I think cutting pay-roll taxes will actually benefit the employee and the employer, in other words increase the threshold of national insurance contributions so that in fact people will actually get money in their pocket, both the employer and the employee, so that that will be spent in the economy and basically with small businesses it would be spent on a local basis.
I think that also we would like to simplify the access to public procurement. There is an awful lot of money that is spent in the public sector in all kinds of forms, but unfortunately government in the past have been pretty poor in enabling small businesses to access. The real figure for 2005/6 I think it was 16%. What we would like to see is the introduction of a single online pre-qualification questionnaire because at the present time, even to get to that stage there are a number of different pre-question qualification forms that are used by different councils, different public financed organisations. So we would like a standard one that would be online to make it more efficient.
We are also concerned about the number of young people who will be affected by this. They will be the first ones, and the figures are already going up. And my question is why can’t we do like Portugal, they receive a 36 month exemption from National Insurance if in fact they take on a young person and it is their first job. And also we would like to see the promotion of part-time workers, a lot of small businesses rely on part-time workers because of the fluctuation in their contracts and in Germany employers and employees only pay half tax and half national insurance contributions, and in Portugal women going back into part-time positions are entitled to a social security payment reduction of 36 months. Something like that would certainly we feel, taking on our five points, could actually get 400,000 jobs either retained or created.
And in relation to retention, I must mention that it is important to retain those people who are presently put on short term and perhaps we should be looking at the short term working compensation scheme to make sure we retain those skills where the employer can’t afford to pay them for the full work. But as I say, why can’t we actually do what Germany and Portugal are doing to help part-time workers and young workers?
Prime Minister:
I think these questions cover the whole range of services that should be or are available for young people and for adults looking for work. I mean the first set of questions really refer to how you can stop people being made redundant in the first place and I accept that the issue of working capital for small businesses, and their ability to retain people as a result of that, is a major issue. Basically we stopped the banks from collapsing but we have still got to get the level of funding that is necessary. I think we will find in the next few days that a number of measures that we are ready to introduce will help small businesses get much of the working capital that they need and help them with the problem that they have had with the banks. So I am very aware that the flow of funds, which has essentially been interfered with by the failure of the banking system, is an essential element for every business, but obviously very dear to small businesses in everything that they can do.
The second issue then here is can we do more to help firms that want to keep on the skilled workers that they have, but feel that their order book is too low for them to be able to do so? Can we find some sort of bridging finance or alternatively some sort of training allowance, and train to gain was mentioned and that is absolutely right. John Denham may wish to say something later about how train to gain can be made more flexible so it can become a form of training time for many employers who want to keep on their workforce, retrain them to better skills during the downturn and are financially enabled to do so. So I can assure you that we are looking at that very carefully.
As for part-time workers, we re-introduced the working tax credit and the children’s tax credit which is available obviously for families where either one or two are in work. It is available for part-time workers and it may be that in some cases that can be the best means by which the wages of a part-time worker can be made up to a higher amount as a result of them applying for the tax credits. If they have to move from full time to part-time that is certainly available to them.
Then the issue of apprenticeships and the public sector has a duty here as well as the private sector. In some sectors of the economy apprenticeships are very high in number and we have done well. I was at Rolls Royce on Wednesday in Derby where they have agreed that they will train almost 30–40% more of the apprentices than they need, and so the word is over-training, but make these apprenticeships available to other companies in the area. We are persuading a large number of employers to do that, to use their training facilities to help other, and particularly small and medium size companies, have the apprentices they need. It is on that basis that we are increasing the number of apprenticeships by 35,000 this year. Remember 10 years ago the apprenticeship was dying out. There is now about a quarter of a million young people doing apprenticeships, and so there are apprenticeships in a whole range of different areas and as I saw with Morrisons today when I met the people who have been through that course, it leads to qualifications that give people a skill that is marketable and a steady job.
But the public sector has a role to play here. Apart from the Ministry of Defence where there are apprenticeships, we have not done as well as we should in public sector apprenticeships and one of the tasks of the next few weeks is to get every department aligned to the need that apprenticeships have got to be hired in the public sector as well and I think you will find a big push on that.
Then this issue of where jobs are available, and there are jobs necessary and needed in the care sector. We are advertising at the moment for teachers and for teaching assistants because there is a shortage of teachers, particularly in particular subjects. There are about 500,000 vacancies in the economy at the moment and about 200,000 new jobs are created still every month. We want people therefore with the skills to be able to take up these vacancies.
I will look at what John says about the various proposals that the Small Businesses Federation have made and I appreciate that the National Federation of Small Businesses does a great job in promoting the case of small businesses in this country. I do believe that the first problem is a funding problem, the second problem is demand in the economy and therefore the government has had to act where the private sector and the banks have failed, to play a role in creating both the money in the economy that is necessary and obviously creating loan facilities for small businesses.
I was asked about companies illegally banning workers in Britain from contracted work that they are doing in Britain. We will look at that very carefully. Derek Simpson did give me the case of one company that we have been asked to look at.
And then the proposals that come from Germany and Portugal, I am meeting Chancellor Merkel this week, we are looking at how we can learn from each other. I am meeting President Sarkozy, then we will have a conference in April with President-Elect Obama coming to Britain and we will look at what each country is doing to deal with the similar circumstances they face. I can say to you we are ready to learn from everything that is done.
So starting from trying to keep people in jobs where these jobs can be saved, to giving people the training as young people leaving school for new jobs, and at the same time of course making sure that people get access to all the vacancies that are available. But recognising that this is a global financial and banking crisis and we have to solve it by making sure that our financial system can actually create and do the work that it is supposed to do. That is to provide the funds that are necessary for business to be able to flourish, so all these things will be done.
Public procurement was the last question. Peter Mandelson, one of his first announcements of course was early payment rather than late payment for small businesses and businesses from government departments. We are trying all the time to open up public procurement. I think I will send you a copy, if you don’t already have it, of the Glover Report looking at how public procurement could be made far more simple, with a single online pre-qualification questionnaire and I gather that that recommendation of the Glover Report, we are looking at how we can implement it soon.
So these are the things that we can do, but we are ready to listen and to learn about things that are in addition to that, and part of this conference today with so many people so distinguished in their own areas, with a wealth of experience from cities and towns round the country, is to learn from what you have to say to us.
Question:
I would like to come back to the question of temporary unemployment. We are facing a new equilibrium and we have to restructure our business accordingly, it is the responsibility of the companies, but we are also facing a trough, which is a short term one, which is very deep, we are only operating at 40 – 50% in terms of relation to capacity. We need some support here from the government in terms of funding for temporary unemployment and also in compensation for upgrading skills. The western European states have such schemes, in Germany with …, in Belgium, in France with … and even the Dutch with nothing, three months ago have set up in two months such a scheme. So Prime Minister you told us that you would review the situation or you would exchange best practices in April, if I may, I do think that is a matter of emergency.
Question:
Prime Minister you have acknowledged the role of retail in helping get people on long term unemployment back into work and we have been very committed as a sector to assisting with that. We are often an entry into employment for people who go on to careers across the wider economy and offer flexible jobs to those combining caring and other activities with employment. Retailing is a property intensive sector and so for us there is a very real interplay between the costs we see from the business rates system and the jobs that we can offer and while some parts of the sector happily are still able to grow jobs, others, not just those going into high profile administrations but across the whole of the sector are having to shed jobs. The Business Rate Bill is having its second reading today and the proposals that that introduce, along with revaluations and the annual increase, will result we estimate in an additional bill of £1.6 billion to retailing over the next couple of years, that is more than a 25% rise in that cost and is equivalent to over 100,000 jobs in retailing. Can we ask for you to give this your urgent attention in order to preserve the jobs in retailing and give us a firm basis for expansion in the future.
Question:
Good Morning Gordon. I wonder if you have looked quite hard at what I believe is an imbalance in outplacements when people are actually being made redundant? It strikes me that senior executives are often given quite substantial support, sometimes in tens of thousands in helping them find new work, and yet for the average worker it seems to me it is too easy to make them redundant and not provide them with any support, and often too easy to then show that on the company’s balance sheet by putting it as an exceptional item. So I think there is a real opportunity here for us to think about how we support those who are made redundant because one of the biggest things that happens of course is that they lose their confidence, self-esteem, and the quicker we can give them that renewed confidence and self-esteem with some financial support, and it doesn’t have to be significant, the quicker I think they will have the confidence to go back out and fight for another job.
Prime Minister:
Well thank you again for a range of questions that I believe deserve even further discussion during the course of the day. First of all you are absolutely right about the problems that we face with companies that have low books, low demand and order books wanting to keep on skilled employees and having a future. Now we distinguished that from companies where they are not going to be viable for the future and whatever we did would not make a difference. But where you have, as you have, a company that is strong in the international market working at lower capacity than it should, then this is an issue for all of us.
John Denham has been working with a number of companies about how the train to gain measures that we have could actually be used in a way that would help companies who want to retain a skilled workforce, as I said earlier, want to retrain these workers into new skills, can have some support from the Train to Gain programme to do so and that is something that we are looking at in some detail. And perhaps John can have a word with you as the session goes on during the course of today.
And we are looking at what is being done in other countries all the time. Germany will announce a new programme today I gather, or tomorrow, and then America will announce a new programme in the next few days and we will try to learn from what is happening in these countries. Training grants can help and we will look at these and how we can use them to best effect.
On the issues that face the retail sector at the moment. I should say that in the last pre-budget report we changed the policy about rate requirements on empty property and narrowed the scope for charging rates on the first few months on that. Equally at the same time there is a national business rate, it is not decided locally and we are obviously sensitive to the needs of business. I should also say that the Bill that is going through Parliament today, the business rate part of it is essentially starting from the concerns about financing Cross Rail where there is a business agreement in London to play their part in financing Cross Rail and that is essentially what it is about. But we are conscious, as you rightly say, of the contribution Jane that the retail sector makes to the economy and the efforts that you have made in the last few years when you in some cases have a larger turnover of people than other companies, to help the long term unemployed into work. And I hope that you will feel that some of the measures that we are introducing today move forward the local employment partnerships in a way that they can be even more effective in the future.
On the problems of people facing redundancy. It is precisely because we understand the problems that people who face redundancy have, and precisely because we do not want to get Britain in the situation that it was in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s where people felt abandoned at the time of a world downturn, that we are taking these extra measures now. Now whatever employers can do to work with us on that is very, very important but we are making the guarantee today that we will provide extra money at the point people become unemployed to give them more advice, at three months to give them tailored help, and at six months to find either another job or help for self-employment or help to get the skill that is necessary for the future and we are creating these 500,000 extra opportunities that would not otherwise exist, and of course that is on top of the work that the Job Centre has done with the New Deal and the flexible New Deal over these last ten years. So we are determined to play our part in this partnership and of course we look forward to working with all of you.
We are in this process where we have a global financial crisis that is caused by the failures of the banking system, but at the same time we have got this massive change taking place in the global economy at the moment, restructuring of industry and services, the rise of Asia, climate change imperatives, new jobs, new qualifications, new skills required in every country of the world and we have got to be very sensitive to the fact that people are experiencing these big changes, people feel insecure, it is the job of government working with industry, business and the trades unions to help people through these difficult times, but to give people the sense and the hope that I believe we can give that in all the range of industries I have talked about, from advanced manufacturing, to digital technologies, to business services, to environmental technologies, to the creative industries in our country, we have a very strong industrial and services base from which we can build for the future and get a very big share of the jobs and of course of the wealth that will be created in the global economy so that everything we do over the next few months is designed not just to help people at the moment, but to prepare people so that we can get the benefit from this future. And it is in the interests of every company as well as every individual that this is how we see it, that action today is to build a better tomorrow today so that we can actually help people meet all these challenges that exist in the global economy.
So we are determined to look at anything that comes forward. I believe that sometimes you have to try and then review the policies so that you make sure you get it right. Because we are in unique circumstances that is a necessary thing to do. And therefore I just repeat again that your views and your ideas and your suggestions today will all be looked at very carefully indeed and we will learn from this interaction and our ability to work together.
Thank you all very much.
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