7. What steps his Department is taking to help unemployed people find work and start their own business. (906479)

The new enterprise allowance scheme offers mentoring support to help people on benefits develop a business plan and a weekly allowance that is payable over six months. That successful scheme has already supported 50,000 new start-up businesses.

Given the progress that is being made with the new enterprise allowance, what steps are being proposed to extend its benefits so that more people can establish more businesses?

My hon. Friend is correct that we need to extend the scheme, and we will do so. People can be referred to places through to March 2016. Not only are we extending the time limit for people to apply; we are extending eligibility to the partners of people who are on jobseeker’s allowance or employment and support allowance, and to those on income support. It is a successful scheme. We want to keep it that way and to expand it as much as we can.

Single parents in Darlington who are on the Work programme have been to see me because they are being told to leave their nine and 10-year-old children at home unsupervised during the school holidays so that they can attend the Work programme. Will the Minister look into that urgently and ensure that such foolish, dangerous, reckless advice is never given to parents?

I thank the hon. Lady for raising that point. We work closely with charity groups such as Gingerbread to ensure that the hours that lone parents have to work and the commitments they have to live up to fit around their lives and the children they look after. That is key to offering the right support for lone parents.

Many unemployed people have been helped back to work by the Government’s excellent apprenticeships scheme. Will the Minister consider extending the scheme to include people who are over 50 so that we can help older people as well?

We will be offering more support to the over-50s. I know how much work my hon. Friend does in this area, not only on jobs fairs, but especially to help people who are over 50. We are supporting people through our fuller working lives initiative and are looking at things such as sector-based work academies and work experience to give returners the extra skills they need to go into a second or third career.

It is one thing to get a job; it is quite another to get a job that pays enough to put food on the table. That is why the majority of people who use the food bank in the Rhondda are in work, which is surely a Dickensian-style disgrace. Is it not a particularly bitter irony that the Conservative club in Tylorstown in the Rhondda closed and is now a food bank?

What we know is that we provide £94 billion in working age benefits. We also know that, for the extra people we have got into work, in-work poverty has actually fallen by 300,000 since the election. The Government are getting more people into work so that they can have a job, a career and a progression—they can move forward. The hon. Gentleman does not want to hear independent statistics, but that is the case. We have more people in jobs than ever before.