Getting to grips with the welfare state must be a key priority. Not only is it the right thing to do to increase productivity and reduce welfare spending, but it speaks to the core Conservative value of empowering people to support themselves.
Helping those who can work, to work is vital at every age; which is why I have been a Kickstart employer (for 16-24 year olds) and an advocate for helping Over 50s back into work. In my latest article for Conservative Home I discussed why it was crucial we reduce the growing number of women on Universal Credit and why to do this, we need more female entrepreneurs.
You can read my piece in Conservative Home, with a short extract below....
Whatever your opinion on how the Government handled Covid, it is undeniable that schemes such as Furlough and Kickstart proved to be a lifeline for many. The knock-on effect of Covid on everything from commerce to student confidence was colossal, yet we can be truly staggered at the fact that we have come out of the pandemic with record employment.
However, we still find ourselves with 1.1 million job vacancies and 1.4 million people on Universal Credit looking for work. The three largest groups on Universal Credit since the pandemic are the Over-50s, women, and those suffering from long-term illness. It is on the latter I should focus today.
My suggestion is Universal Enterprise, a relaunch of the Enterprise Allowance scheme targeted at women.
The Enterprise Allowance scheme, introduced by Margaret Thatcher in 1981 and reintroduced as the New Enterprise Allowance (NEA) by David Cameron in 2011, aimed to support job seekers into entrepreneurship, by providing them with access to a business mentor, financial support for up to 6 months and the chance to apply for a loan of up to £25,000 to help with start-up costs.
The scheme helped to launch more than 105,000 businesses by 2017 and 40 per cent of those starting new businesses through the scheme were women.
NEA was discontinued in January 2022. In October to December 2022, 110,000 more women were working as employees than in January to March 2020. The number of self-employed women fell by 119,000 over the same period.
Read the full article here: https://conservativehome.com/2023/05/12/jamila-robertson-encouraging-entrepreneurialism-is-a-conservative-approach-to-getting-women-into-work/
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