The Chancellor, too, is right to focus on using incentives to encourage those who can work to remain in the labour force and this should figure prominently in the March Budget.
Immigration is an important short-term palliative, but cannot remain an excuse for British businesses not to invest or train up domestic workers.
In many places that need levelling up, the real unemployment rate exceeds the number of job vacancies; labour supply is a greater problem in the South.
Commentators focus their attention on the Red or Blue walls, but the Conservatives shouldn’t turn their backs on the green bridge of voters in both camps, especially when we have a strong record on climate and the environment.
Turning complaints about headline figures into a detailed programme to bring them down would teach us a lot about whoever tried it.
There is a danger, not to mention an irony, in a conservatism that views a mother, carer, or retiree as just an inactive worker.
I wish to be your guardian angel, and whisk you off to another reality for a moment – one where a Conservative government did not exist…
If all young people who are received support as effective as Spear, it would mean 130,000 young people moving into employment, simultaneously filling over 10 per cent of the vacancies that are so troubling British businesses.
We need our Conservative government to do what it does best: provide a path to prosperity and empower people to get back to work.
We need to give more time and resource to those bringing up children. Such parents need a much better package from the state to look after a baby in the first year of its life.
Is he fated to be a fire-fighter, a leader grappling with crisis? Or can he find the political space to deliver a more personal message – perhaps to do with education?
Despite the rhetoric, it looks as if ministers have given up on bringing numbers down in favour of anything to give the economy a nudge.
Risk and income sharing agreements allow institutions and students to become partners and shift losses on poor-value courses away from taxpayers.
The regeneration will create 25,000 permanent jobs and homes for 20,000 people, all in less than a square mile. Astonishingly, Wandsworth’s new Labour-run Council boycotted last week’s opening.
My note of caution is that if the Government changes the rules on ratios now, the noise about it will drown every other positive thing we try to do.