Government Record on Education, Employment and Welfare

Lord Willetts Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Willetts (Con)]

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, on calling this debate. One can sense in the interventions from all sides of the House the deep disappointment and frustration that we now—once again, shockingly—have 1 million young people who are NEET. It is particularly frustrating, as tackling the problem is not a deeply mysterious intractable issue that cannot possibly be addressed; it is absolutely solvable. The noble Baroness, Lady Evans, set out in her excellent speech the wider policies that are necessary to bring down the number of NEETs. I will focus on specific policies aimed at those young people who, tragically, are already NEET or may be about to become so.

The evidence from a range of initiatives under successive Governments, including those going back to the 1980s and 1990s, is that some combination of the following is needed: direct support for building up employability skills, so that employers do not think that it is high risk to take on someone who is NEET or about to be NEET; plus some lowering of the costs to employers of taking them on, either through a general reduction or specific incentives and rewards. There have been lots of initiatives over the decades. They work, but the trouble is they cost money, partly because there is a dead-weight cost. Some young people get off benefits and into work anyway and the Treasury does not like expensive schemes, so to win the argument for more of these programmes they have to be as well targeted as possible.

There is an increasing amount of data across Whitehall now—from the NHS about family circumstances, from the Department for Education itself and from other government bodies—that would enable us to identify young people who are at greatest risk of being NEET for whom interventions would be most effective. However, across Whitehall you hear, “GDPR stops us sharing the data”. The data is not brought together and those 16 and 17 year-olds are tragically lost to the system.

There is an initiative, Kickstarter, that tries to break down data barriers to pooling information across Whitehall. The Department for Education participates in this initiative and its programme typically, and admirably, is about early years. It identifies children at the age of two and a half who are at risk of turning up at school, at five, underprepared. Why does the Department for Education not also run a Kickstarter initiative to identify NEETs by pooling data from across Whitehall, so that policies and programmes to help young people into work are effectively targeted and more affordable?

It is just possible that these programmes will still have a cost, so we need to find a means of financing them. It is striking that the triple lock on pensions is now costing £12.6 billion a year extra in benefit expenditure than if the pension had simply been linked to earnings since 2012 when the triple lock was introduced. So, if, as well as effective use of public spending through linking data, further resource is needed, I suggest that pension expenditure, which is the most rapidly rising and most expensive part of the total welfare budget, should be where savings are found to tackle the problem to which all sides of the House are clearly committed.