Government Record on Education, Employment and Welfare

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend Baroness Evans of Bowes Park, in her excellent speech, and many others, have made strong points about the previous Government’s achievements in education. I will not repeat them, except to say that we are in the bizarre position of having delegations from overseas visiting our schools to see how we have achieved so much in education—even as the current Government work to dismantle the reforms that enabled this great progress.

I want to speak today about young people and their trajectory from childhood to productive and satisfying adulthood. Our national aim should be to build children and young people’s capacity and resilience on every front, yet the current focus of education and welfare systems is working against that. Government education policies overwhelmingly target disadvantage and low achievement. That sounds lovely, but this policy is built around mechanisms that encourage children and young people to view themselves as damaged or less than capable.

Once a child is defined and sees themselves that way, such as through having a SEND label and then perhaps a child disability allowance claim, it is now all too likely that they will become an early PIP claimant, at which point their chances of ever moving into stable employment are increasingly poor. In fact, a decision to grant PIP to a young person who suffers from, say, anxiety or ADHD, may be the single cruellest thing a Government could ever do to them. All too probably, it consigns them unnecessarily to a lifetime of dependency, yet such claims have rocketed in the past two years.

I am afraid that the Timms review shows, by its weakness and its omissions, that there is no real appetite to address this appalling waste of human life. It does not distinguish between some fundamentally different types of condition. There are some disabilities that are lifelong and preclude work entirely. There are some that are lifelong and that will limit some aspects of capacity permanently, but that do not preclude people’s ability and willingness to work; Down syndrome is a good example. There are other conditions that may be temporary or permanent but, for most, need only be temporarily debilitating. Most people diagnosed with anxiety or ADHD should ultimately be successful and happy at work, so a blanket disability label is failing many of them.

The review also does not recognise that the explosion in numbers may partly reflect a loss of confidence and resilience in our population, rather than any real loss of capacity. It also dismisses the very real loss of public confidence in PIP, despite much evidence for this. DWP’s own figures show that detected fraud has tripled in the past year. The review barely touches on the value of work to individuals, but we know that there is a huge human cost of worklessness. The Minister, Sir Stephen Timms MP, seems entirely unconcerned about the apparently uncontrollable increase in PIP spending, described as “not of great concern”. Yet, as Alan Milburn has pointed out, we are spending a lot on young people, but on the wrong things.

My noble friends Lady Coffey, Lady Stedman-Scott, Lord Willetts, and many others have made constructive suggestions. Recent Budgets and legislation have plainly worsened employer willingness and capacity to hire the young, and youth unemployment is predictably rising. Can the Minister tell us whether the Government will direct the Timms review to addressing the difficult questions that, I am afraid, it has so far ducked? Will the Government bring forward measures to modify the policies they have brought in that, no matter how well-intended, are proving damaging to human lives?