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Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

The thrust of my argument is not that everything is perfect. Part of the—[Interruption.] I will come back to the point about NEETs in a second. Part of the argument that we are using is that, having come so far and laid the foundations—they were very expensive foundations to lay and they were never even remotely matched by the Conservative party—we can now move on to ensure that we close the attainment gap between children from more deprived backgrounds and children from more prosperous backgrounds. The number of NEETs has been around a stubborn 10 per cent. for the past 10 years. The number of youngsters in education and training has increased. That is clear. A combination of the introduction of the education maintenance allowance and higher attainment, which encourages youngsters to stay on in school, has led to something like a 5 per cent. increase in participation rates. It is also fair to say and worth pointing out that only 1 per cent. of youngsters who are NEET are not in education, employment or training in each of those years—16, 17 and 18. There is a hard core that we need to address and a lot is going into addressing that. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor announced yesterday another measure, costing £500,000, to offer youngsters who have dropped out of in-work training to bring them back into education. We have another, similar project going on in 10 local authority areas, to see what we can do to help those youngsters. Some of it is about gap years. Some of it is about the fact that they just want to take time out. A lot of it is about being disenchanted with education and having the ability to bring those young people back into the fold. It is an important problem. We are not saying that we have solved it, but our investment and our measures are capable of resolving it eventually.