Summer Jobs

Debate between Blair McDougall and Rebecca Smith

Tuesday 7th July 2026 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business and Trade (Blair McDougall)]

It is a pleasure to close this debate after so many thoughtful contributions from hon. Members across the House. Many difficult questions have been raised. I thought of following the example of the soon-to-be-former hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) in just resigning to avoid those difficult questions—[Interruption.]. I will resist the encouragement.

It has been fantastic to listen to hon. Members talking about their own experience of Saturday and summer jobs. It allowed me to imagine the right hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Wendy Morton) running around with multiple plates balanced on her arms, and the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Blake Stephenson) getting busy with his chamois. I pictured the hon. Member for Aberdeen South (Douglas Lumsden), who I belatedly welcome to his position, as a postie in shorts, fighting the rain coming off the North sea. I pictured the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) with long, flowing locks getting busy scrubbing pots in the Italian sunshine. That was important, because it allowed me to picture Conservative MPs doing something productive. More importantly and seriously, it was a reminder of the importance of our first employment experiences in making ourselves into fully rounded human beings and workers.

My job was working on Saturdays before going to university and in the summers at Beveridge fishmongers’ in Giffnock. The antisocial teenager in me would want to be in the back of the shop filleting something, but every time a customer came in I had to remake myself and find confidence all over again. It is in no way an overstatement to say that all the Saturday and summer jobs that hon. Members have spoken about are why we are all here. They gave us that first chance and opportunity to find confidence in ourselves, as many hon. and right hon. Members have said.

However, I will caution Conservative Members. Yes, this is about experience and people finding an opportunity and, as some have said, avoiding the long-term scarring effect of youth unemployment, but for many young workers this is about paying the bills. These jobs are not a nice additional thing. I think of the young woman with a family who I met; she had a zero-hours contract and simply did not know from month to month whether she would be able to pay her rent or take her kids to anything special.

My hon. Friend the Member for Banbury (Sean Woodcock) spoke powerfully about how insecurity in the workplace is linked to the health of the economy. When people’s incomes are hollowed out, it hollows out the centre of our towns and ends up in the empty high street shops that we see.

[Rebecca Smith]

The Minister makes a very interesting point about city centres being hollowed out, but the main thrust of this debate is about young people doing summer jobs before they go back to school or university in the autumn. They are the very young people who would ordinarily take those wages to buy a hot chocolate in Lorenzo’s, like I used to, or to go and buy the new pair of trainers that they have saved up for. If they do not have a job in the first place and do not come from a family in which their parents can subsidise all those things, they miss out on that opportunity. While I accept the point he is making, will he accept the point I am making? The very thing we are discussing this afternoon is part of that problem, and removing those young people from the market altogether will not help.

[Blair McDougall]

The reason I am responding to the debate by talking about the impact of zero-hours contracts is that Conservative Member after Conservative Member rose to speak in defence of those contracts. Of course, many people value flexibility in the workplace, but some employers have used that flexibility to take advantage of their employees, including young employees.

--- Later in debate ---

[Blair McDougall]

Those people will still be able to have those contracts under the legislation, but we are talking about potentially hundreds of people in the right hon. Member’s constituency—that was his formulation—who rely on zero-hours contracts as their main form of employment, with no certainty of income from month to month. That cannot go on in this country; it is fundamentally unfair.

Several Conservative Members mentioned business rates, which the Government take incredibly seriously. The Conservative party began the revaluation without any plans whatsoever for any transitional support or relief for the people affected by it; Labour introduced a support package worth £4.3 billion to protect ratepayers from seeing large overnight bill increases because of that revaluation. As my hon. Friend the Member for Rhondda and Ogmore (Chris Bryant) said, over half of ratepayers will see no bill increases this year, and 23% will see their bills go down. Plenty of arguments could be made about whether we have gone far enough and how far our continued reforms of business rates should continue, and my colleagues in the Treasury will do that, but for members of a party that had no plans for any relief whatsoever to be saying now that they will spend £4 billion on abolishing those rates altogether, without saying where it will come from, is frankly ridiculous.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Jonathan Davies) mentioned the great British savings this summer, and made a very fair request for those in the Treasury, as they look at the overall impact of that, to look at the impact on individual young people as well.

Many Opposition Members rightly raised the impact of increased national insurance contributions. As I have said before from the Dispatch Box, we recognise that that was a big ask of business, but what it did was say to the international money markets that we were a serious country again. That has been seen in lower mortgages, and in lower borrowing rates for businesses. I understand the genuine concern expressed by Opposition Members about the impact on youth employment, but I would say that it is at best a partial explanation, given that employers of workers under the age of 21 and those employing young apprentices do not pay national insurance.

The hon. Members for South West Hertfordshire (Mr Mohindra) and for Meriden and Solihull East (Saqib Bhatti) and the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green suggested that whenever a Government add to existing business costs, we should think about the cumulative impact rather than viewing it in isolation, and that is an entirely fair argument. Every time we ask something of businesses, that gives us in government a further incentive and, indeed, responsibility to do more to remove costs from them. That is precisely why, through the £2.5 billion youth guarantee package, businesses are being given a £3,000 incentive to employ 18 to 24-year-olds who are at risk of long-term unemployment, a £2,000 incentive to hire foundational apprentices, a further £2,000 to hire apprentices aged between 16 and 24, and fully funded costs for 16 to 24-year-old apprentices. That, of course, is on top of all the other work that we are doing to reduce the costs on business.

[Rebecca Smith]

I am glad that the Minister has brought up the subject of fully funded apprenticeships for those under 25. As soon as that was announced, an electrician in my constituency contacted me and said, “That is all well and good, but I still have to pay the higher wages.” Although such businesses are not paying national insurance, this is not as free, or as cheap, as the Government maintain. Will the Minister accept that it is not 100% correct to say that these are fully funded apprenticeships, because those businesses still have to pay increased salaries?

[Blair McDougall]

As was said earlier, we believe that people working full time should be able to afford the basics in life. My point is that we are dealing with the issue of youth unemployment by incentivising businesses to employ young people.

Many Opposition Members mentioned red tape. They will not have to wait terribly long to see the work that the Secretary of State and I have been doing to reduce the administrative burden on business. Many others spoke about additional costs being imposed on business. Let me remind them that our target to reduce that administrative burden by £5.6 billion is a net target, and they will not have to wait very long to see the progress that we have made in that regard.