Unemployment: 'poor job matching' is the problem

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith has claimed that unemployment is less of a problem that some are suggesting and would be significantly lower if jobless workers were better matched to vacancies.

 
He told the Conservative spring conference in Cardiff yesterday that the Labour Party was wrong to say that the coalition government’s welfare revamp would fail because there were currently half a million vacancies in the economy. As a result, “it’s short-sighted to say there aren’t any jobs at the moment”, he said.
 
Duncan Smith’s statement came despite figures from the Office of National Statistics indicating that unemployment rose by 0.1% to 7.9% in the fourth quarter of last year. This means that 2.49 million people are currently out of work.
 
The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development also forecast last month that unemployment would hit 9% or about 2.7 million this year, peaking at 9.5% in 2012.
 
But Duncan Smith 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,” adding that Labour’s failure to help UK-born people find work had fuelled immigration.
 
“So who took all the new jobs? Over half of them went to foreign nationals,” he said. “This isn’t about immigration. It’s a simple question of supply and demand. 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.”
 
As a result, the answer was to help the jobless become better able to take up vacancies by making work more profitable via welfare reform and by providing training and support to those facing significant barriers to returning to work, Duncan Smith said.
 
The Work and Pensions Secretary recently urged those looking for work to “get on the bus” and find a job further from home, echoing Norman Tebbit’s controversial instructions in the 1980s for the unemployed to get on their bikes.