Anne Main welcomes the improved economic situation and Government initiatives that have led to an increase in the number of apprenticeships and a fall in unemployment in St Albans.

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Mrs Anne Main (St Albans) (Con): It is an honour to participate in this debate, because we have some really good news in St Albans. I can tell Labour Members that people there appreciate an improving economy under the measures taken by this Government.

Many of my constituents who commute into London because they are part of the knowledge-based economy will have taken a very dim view of taking hours to get to work this morning. It is amazing that Labour Members have not touched on the fact that an estimated £200 million was lost to the economy by the strikes that were called for today and that 3 million hard-working people will have been forced to traipse miles to work or not have been able to get to work. That is thanks to today’s strike, of which Labour Members have refused to take any cognisance.

We are very lucky in St Albans to have an unemployment rate of only 1.6%. Even with that low rate, there have been significant improvements. Youth unemployment stands at 2.6%, which is half the UK average, but apprenticeships have doubled in the past three years. Under the Labour Government in 2007-10, St Albans had only 630 apprenticeships; now, in 2010-13, it has 1,410 apprenticeships.

If the public have been watching this debate, they will have heard a new slogan from Labour Members—“Don’t just take any old job.” I look forward to some analysis of which jobs they think are valuable and which they think are any old jobs. I have in my constituency young people getting into jobs who feel the benefit of the experience that being in the workplace brings.

We have heard nothing from Labour Members today about the fact that if we had obeyed their rules on fuel duty, many of the small businesses that are thriving in St Albans would have found themselves paying 13p a litre more. The hard-pressed families to whom many Labour Members refer are spending £7 a week less under the Conservatives than they would have done if Labour were in power. There has been a great deal of assistance for people who run those small businesses. I notice that Labour Members do not wish to intervene on me when I say that this would have been the state of the economy under Labour.

We do not say that there are no problems. However, there should at least be some acknowledgement by Labour Members of an economy that was so broken by them, that they did so little to fix, and in which they did not even think about fuel prices for small businesses, deliverymen, and all the people in our economy who get themselves to work. They will not condemn the strikes that prevented many people from getting to work, but they are lambasting us for not doing more to get people proper jobs. This is very surprising from a party that said that it wished to see some form of job creation and that the unemployment rate would rise. That has patently proved to be untrue.

What is more, we help the parents who are lucky enough to get into jobs by making their child care more affordable, and, if they go to work in their car, they will find that their fuel duty is lower. We have also increased the amount of child-care time to which they are entitled.

The motion does not reflect the true state of the economy. Nobody is saying that there is nothing more to do—of course there is. When people trudge into work yet again tomorrow, and when so many of us and our constituents trudge home tonight—many people commute into London from St Albans—perhaps the Labour party will reflect on the amount of money that could have been in the economy and the amount of people who could have got to work today. They were prevented from doing so by a union leader who lives in social housing because he feels it is his due, rather than because he needs it, and who has not apologised for the disruption he is causing to the economy that the Government are choosing to improve.

I would welcome a visit from any Labour Member to St Albans, where they will see that there is optimism even in affluent areas such as mine and that people who had found it hard to get jobs are now, through mature and youth apprenticeships, getting jobs and work experience. I defy Labour Members to tell any of them that those are not proper jobs.

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