King’s Speech

Baroness Stedman-Scott Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Hobby, and my noble friend Lord Blackwater, on their maiden speeches. It is great to have both noble Lords in the House, with their differing views; I am sure that they will add much value between them.

It will not take noble Lords many moments to realise that nearly 1 million young people in the country are NEET. The Minister will no doubt stand up and say that these problems worsened after Covid under the previous Government, that we are to blame and that we should look at ourselves before criticising this Government. So, to save her the trouble, I will say it for her. Are noble Lords listening? Yes, part of this problem is structural. Yes, part of it reflects the long shadow and economic scarring of the pandemic. But what we cannot ignore, excuse or allow to slip by are the deliberate political choices that this Government have taken which are actively making the situation worse.

If the objective is genuinely to support youth employment, improve labour market participation and reduce barriers to work for younger people entering the labour market—and, surely, that should be the objective—you do not tax employment more heavily. You do not increase the marginal cost of taking on an extra member of staff. And you certainly do not increase employer national insurance at precisely the moment that businesses are already becoming more hesitant about hiring those at the edges of the labour market. Nor do you create uncertainty for business through the Employment Rights Act and make employers even more cautious about taking someone on.

The unemployment figures are going only one way and I would desperately ask the Government to rethink their policies on this. If we are serious about getting young people into work, we need to focus on two things at the same time: a young person’s readiness for work through skills, education and support, but also the cost and risks of employing somebody in the first place.

The Government have at least recognised that there is a problem—I welcome that—but the youth guarantee scheme, while it has many good parts, leaves a great deal to be desired. With the number of young people not in education, employment or training continuing to rise, we have to be honest: this is not simply a temporary labour market fluctuation, nor a problem to be solved by a single programme at the end of the process. Something more systemic is going wrong further up the line.

Let me suggest what should happen long before a young person ever reaches the point of becoming NEET. The school curriculum should have fundamentally running through it preparing young people for the world of work. I have told this story before and I will tell it again: when I was at Tomorrow’s People, we had a young girl who had never worked. We got her a job in the Unipart factory in Oxford, booking the executive director’s travel; she had died and gone to heaven with that as her first job. On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday she turned up, but on Friday she was a no-show.

We got in the car and drove round to her house. She came downstairs in her pyjamas. We said, “What’s going on?” She said, “I never went to school on Friday and nobody ever said anything”. We told her to get dressed, took her back to work and thought that was it. The second week, the same thing happened again. We took her back to work. By the third week, it was right.

I do not have long enough for this, but I will just finish quickly. I will leave the Minister with these questions. How do the Government believe their current approach helps young people such as the one I have just described? How does increasing the costs and risks of employment make employers more likely to take a chance on younger workers? When will the Government recognise that, if we truly want to tackle the NEET crisis, we must focus not only on programmes at the end of the process, but on the deeper cultural, educational and economic barriers that are stopping too many young people entering the world of work in the first place?