The Work and Pensions Secretary said that unemployment would be significantly
lower if jobless workers could be better-matched to vacancies.
UK unemployment stands at 2.5 million. Mr Duncan Smith told the Conservative
spring conference in Cardiff that was less of a problem than some have
suggested.
“It’s shortsighted to say there aren’t any jobs at the moment. The fact is
there are around half a million vacancies in the economy at the moment,” he
said.
“It’s not the absence of jobs that’s the problem. It’s the failure to match
the unemployed to the jobs there are.”
The Office of National Statistics said in Febuary that there are 500,000
vacant jobs in the UK, one for every five people officially counted as
unemployed.
Mr Duncan Smith said the answer was to help the jobless become better-able to
take up vacant jobs.
Coalition welfare reforms will help the unemployment do that by making work
more profitable, and by giving training and support to those with the most
significant barriers to get back to work, he said.
The minister said that Labour’s failure to help British unemployed people
compete for an win jobs had fuelled immigration in recent years.
The last 13 years saw the number of people in employment increase by 2.5
million, he said. Yet today there are around 5 million people on out-of-work
benefits.
“So who took all the new jobs? Over half of them went to foreign nationals.
This isn’t about immigration. It is a simple question of supply and demand,”
he said.
“We had a supply of labour – the unemployed. We had a demand for labour – all
the new jobs. But we couldn’t match them up, so we had to import people who
could do the work.”
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