Welfare Reforms and Youth Unemployment

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Walker of Broxton. He has a huge amount of practical advice but, as he said, we cannot keep kicking the can down the road. Youth unemployment, he said, was a tragedy, and I agree with him. We have seen it rise in recent times. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Rainow, for enabling us to hold this debate, which is timely in the context of the Milburn review.

First, welfare support should not be removed from young people if there is no work for them to do. Young people do want to work; they do not prefer to live on benefits. I have been a member of two Select Committees reporting in recent years on youth unemployment. I chaired the Youth Unemployment Committee that reported Skills for Every Young Person in November 2021. It had been the proposal of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, from whom we shall hear shortly; I look forward to that. We identified a huge skills mismatch between the needs of employers and the qualifications of young people leaving school. We identified deficiencies in the digital skills of young people. We were concerned by the narrowness of the national curriculum. We saw the need for more technical and vocational education and more apprenticeships for school leavers. We understood the importance of work experience and the capacity of employers to meet demand.

I was then a member of the committee chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, which late in 2024 produced a report, Think Work First, on the transition from education to work for young disabled people. We know from Mencap that 86% of young people with a learning disability want a job. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, said that the report provided a blueprint for the new Government to implement their manifesto commitment to getting more young disabled people into work, and to bridge the gap between education and work for them. Two key proposals were supported internships and better career support in schools, to which I think we should add more face-to-face assessments for those being interviewed for personal independence payments and the decisions around that.

What has happened? We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Evans, that more than 1 million are not in education, employment and training and the number is growing. Youth unemployment today stands at 16.2%. The long-term impact of Covid, the rise of AI and the lack of entry-level jobs all add together to make the picture worryingly bleak. Crucially, half of those not in education, employment and training have never worked. Yet the cost of youth unemployment is £125 billion in benefit payments and lost tax revenues taken together. DWP statistics show that for every £25 spent on benefits, only £1 is spent on helping young people into work; I find those to be astonishing figures. I have concluded that the DWP is too centralised: we need to devolve now to combined authorities and mayors and to give them a clear responsibility to deliver a reduction in NEETs and a real increase in youth employment in their areas.

We can compare ourselves with the Netherlands, where there is stronger vocational education and better, more targeted financial support for business. There is a work experience system and a welfare system that promotes engagement by young people. Municipal authorities, not central government, run welfare programmes.

The noble Lord, Lord Walker of Broxton, was very helpful about the need to support employers. The Government’s youth guarantee is good but it needs to be part of a package of tax incentives, and the truth is that the national insurance rise has been a significant disincentive. To conclude, too many young people are leaving school without the skills that they need to succeed or that employers need. Support through coaching is insufficient. I remember our taking evidence from young people who said that the jobcentre saw them as statistics. The jobcentre’s objective was to get the young person into a job, whether or not that job was suitable for them or might lead them to a career. We have to get coaching of individual young people so much better.

Reforming the Child Maintenance Service (Public Services Committee Report)

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Monday 8th June 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, for her leadership in what was an important and complex inquiry. I also thank her for what she said just now, which I found a forensic analysis of the operation of the Child Maintenance Service. I thank all the staff for their support to the committee. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, too, for her suggestion—for it was her suggestion—that we should undertake this inquiry when she was a member of the Public Services Committee.

I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, for bringing her experience as a Minister to the Select Committee’s work, and for her important suggestions to improve outcomes for children. As she just said, it is about how much money is getting to the child. Getting money to kids who need it is a means to alleviate some child poverty.

I thank the staff of the Child Maintenance Service for the information that they provided and the explanation, from their perspective, of issues that we raised. I particularly thank them for their welcome when we visited the service in Hastings.

My conclusion, in view of the Minister’s response letter that we were sent in March, is that this committee’s work is not complete. I hope that, when we hear from her later, she will reassure us that progress will be made on our recommendations.

I agree with all the conclusions from the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. As she said, it is very difficult to avoid the conclusion that the system does not work well for many people. For some families, the system is a 100% failure, as she said. I was surprised to find how slow and inadequate enforcement is; it is simply not strong enough. As the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, just reminded us, too many children—220,000—are not getting a single penny. The Government run this service with 3,500 staff; as 220,000 children do not get a single penny, it seems a failure. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, also reminded us, there is a big issue with communications—particularly, from my perspective, communications with those trying to use the system.

The inquiry sat for several months and reported in October last year. About half way through, I recall beginning to think about who was actually in charge of the Child Maintenance Service—the Minister, the department more broadly or the Child Maintenance Service itself. Indeed, I have now begun to wonder whether decisions are now being made elsewhere in Whitehall and not by the Minister and her department at all. I think this matters, but I cannot interpret what I have just said because the Minister’s letter of 6 March accepts that changes are needed but gives no indication of what the Government are going to do or when they are going to do it.

Primary legislation will be needed to remove direct pay and transfer those cases to collect and pay. That is the Government’s intention, but I cannot see—as the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, just pointed out—how such a transfer can be achieved at no cost, but that is what we have been told. I think the case has been made that direct pay should be retained for those who prefer it. Apparently, administrative liability orders will be legislated for as soon as possible. Of course they should, but that was true months ago. What is the plan for when the orders will be legislated for? The Minister may make a set of announcements when she speaks later.

As we took evidence, I grew more concerned by the performance of telephony services. We said in paragraph 24 of our conclusions and recommendations:

“It is unacceptable that parents still face an average 18-minute waiting time to speak to the CMS on the phone, with tens of thousands of callers waiting over an hour and over 500,000 calls being abandoned in the last year alone”.


I am reaching the conclusion that the CMS wants to run a digital service and reduce telephony, even though telephony enables a problem to be ironed out immediately through synchronous discussion. I hope the Minister will reassure us that the telephony systems will be improved, because they can be more efficient.

I also concluded that the service is very slow to change in both reaching decisions and then implementing them. The consultation on the child maintenance calculation, about which we heard further earlier this afternoon, needs to be very clear as to what its objective is. We also need a much stronger definition of non-compliance in collect and pay, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, said.

I found the Minister’s response on key performance indicators, in her letter at the beginning of March, disappointing. The response to question 7, which asked why the DWP would not publish the number or proportion of calls facing excessive wait times despite holding the data, said that all developments to official statistics are progressed through the statistical work programme. When are performance indicators official statistics? If the information on key performance indicators is there, it should be made publicly available. They exist but they are, I regret to say, hidden from public gaze; I do not understand why that should be.

When Select Committees take evidence, one of the most valuable things they can do is listen to the recipients of a service. It is not enough to listen only to those providing the service. We held two engagement events, one with receiving parents and another with paying parents. Let me read out the key words in our report on bias:

“Almost all receiving parents believed the system was biased towards paying parents, allowing them to reduce their payments or evade altogether due to the lack, and timeliness, of enforcement and the loopholes in calculations”.


However, when I listened to paying parents, they said the opposite. As the report states:

“Almost all parents believed that the Child Maintenance system, its processes and the underlying legislation was biased against the paying parent, and in favour of the receiving parent”.


There are two ways of looking at those two different facts. One is to say, “If both the receiving and paying parents are unhappy, that probably means the Government have got it just about right”. However, the opposite is what I believe to be true: both the receiving and paying parents are right, and what they are talking about is their own personal experience of the operation of the service.

I hope that the Minister has read the summary notes in our report on our engagement events with both paying and receiving parents—I am sure she has—because I found them very instructive. One thing that was asked for was a shared narrative. Receiving parents were fed up with having to re-explain the circumstances of their case each time they rang up because a different person was receiving their call. That person would then get some information on a screen, but it would not be available to the person who had made the call. One thing I hope the Government will look at is creating a shared narrative on a screen that both participants in a call can read. I understand the difficulties around this being private information held by the Child Maintenance Service but, equally, it is very important that the receiving parent who wishes to raise an issue can be confident that the information they are talking about is available to the person with whom they are speaking.

In conclusion, it is true that in many cases the Child Maintenance Service works well, in particular in straightforward cases. Reforming the calculation formula has become a very urgent matter, and so has speeding up enforcement. I have the highest regard for the CMS’s 3,500 highly committed staff. They are in the front line of reducing child poverty, and over 1 million children depend on the system working to keep them out of poverty. Yet 100,000 children miss out on maintenance payments every quarter, and around one-third of separated families have no child maintenance arrangement at all. So I conclude that this is work in progress. I just wish that action to effect change could be speedier.

Welfare Reform

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness raises a very important point about face-to-face assessments. There used to be face-to-face assessments; they were stopped during Covid and restarted only slowly and at quite a low level. We have said publicly that we want to ramp those back up again, so she raises an important point. On the Motability scheme, just for clarity, nothing in the proposals in the Bill now or in earlier incarnations affects the mobility element of PIP, only the daily living allowance, but I take her broader point and I will be happy to have a look at that.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I will ask the Minister a very specific question about young people. The Statement says that almost 1 million young people are not in education, employment or training—they are NEETs. It then says that that is one in eight of all young people. That figure is true if you count 16 to 24 year-olds, but if you take 18 to 24 year-olds, it is 14.8%, which amounts to one in seven of our young people. Indeed, over the past five years, as the Minister probably knows, the number has been rising. One of the big problems is that 29% of 16 to 24 year-olds with a disability are NEET, but only 9% of that age range without a disability are NEET. What are the Government planning to do to help young people, far too many of whom are not in education, employment or training?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, because that is a really important point. We should all be worried about the number of young people who are not in education, employment or training. What chance do you have in your adult life if you do not get anything at the start? He also raised an important point about why. The truth is that the evidence takes you so far.

We are bringing in a youth guarantee for all 18 to 21 year-olds to ensure that they can easily access quality training, an apprenticeship or help to find work. We will also shortly be running trailblazers around the country for 12 months and we will use them to inform the design. They will try different things, because we want to try to find out what works for different kinds of young people. We talk about young people as though they are all the same, and of course they clearly are not. Some young people who are severely disabled will never work and we will need to give them appropriate support. There may be others who are having, for example, mental or some physical health challenges and, with the appropriate support, health support, encouragement and other forms of local support, they could begin to move back towards the workplace. I am really looking forward, as the pilots start to be evaluated, to finding evidence about what works, taking that out and changing things.