Getting Britain Working Again

David Smith Excerpts

Thursday 14th May 2026 Commons Chamber

[David Smith (North Northumberland) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse), whose comments on community energy I will come to in a moment.

It is a real honour to speak in this debate on the Loyal Address on behalf of my constituents in North Northumberland, where the electricity grid is owned by Warren Buffett, the water system is overseen from Hong Kong and most of the buses are run out of Miami. Across many decades and multiple Governments, we have made ourselves a society where everything can be bought and sold for the right price, but the things that matter are often slipping away.

We heard renewed commitments in the King’s Speech from the Government to improve our economic security, whether by ensuring a fair deal for working people, responding to the Timms and Milburn reviews on welfare or delivering an energy independence Bill. I welcome those commitments. According to the pollster More in Common, seven in 10 Britons feel that our country is “on the wrong track”, and

“many are starting to conclude that the problems…lie…with the system itself.”

This is a long-term trend. The job of the Government must therefore be to cast a vision of the future that transforms the status quo and then implements it. But what does that future look like, and how does it relate to the economic issues of work, welfare and energy?

The late Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said:

“We are each a letter in God’s book. Like a letter, we have no meaning on our own, but joined together in families, communities and nations, we form sentences and paragraphs and become part of God’s story.”

Even if we do not share his religious views, Sacks’s message is clear: life must be lived together. Sacks called this a covenant. We are used to talking in terms of a social contract—a phrase we hear a lot—but the social contract asks, “What am I getting out of this?”, while the social covenant asks, “What do we owe each other?”. We therefore need to legislate for a society that helps us to think about what we owe each other.

Work remains central to the task of transforming the country. This is one of the Government’s top priorities—we are, after all, the Labour party. Work is also the main way that we contribute to our shared national life. However, our national relationship with work is threatened. One million young people are not in education, employment or training, and AI is threatening a period of disruption that we have not seen since the days of the spinning jenny. We have done many worthwhile things already to improve work; the Employment Rights Act 2025 was a landmark piece of legislation. However, we need to go further to restore the way that we see and do work.

The UK is below average among major nations for in-work training, so we should require employers to invest in their employees’ skills with training opportunities. We should also incentivise a stakeholder economy in which more staff share in the value that they help to create, and replicate the European model of giving ordinary workers seats on company boards. In short, the success of the company should be linked to the thriving of its employees. The steel industry nationalisation Bill creates the perfect opportunity for us to model that for the rest of the economy. Working together in a covenantal Britain, we can see that change.

Covenant also speaks to our social security system. According to the last data available, 24 million people in the UK are receiving some form of benefits, including pensions. The total cost of our welfare system is greater than our income tax take, and that strain is weakening our togetherness and the idea of fairness on which the system relies. We need a new Beveridge report for the 21st century. The original report identified—in anachronistic language—the five giants as want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. I suggest that the giants of 2026 are: poverty, worklessness, isolation and hopelessness.

I welcome the Government’s upcoming response to the Milburn and Timms reviews. We are a party that will always support the most vulnerable in our society, and it is right and just to support those who cannot work or who need help to work. We need a welfare system that is based on contribution and in which people are delighted to say, “Yes, I am my brother’s keeper.”

Finally, I welcome the Government’s commitment to energy security and the energy independence Bill in the King’s Speech, but without a covenantal relationship between Government and community, we will lose support for the green transition. King’s College London has found that the share of those who support net zero sooner than 2050 has halved since 2021. Meanwhile, energy price rises are already affecting parts of our country and our economy, as we all know. When the first American missile was launched into Iran, some of my constituents’ heating and hot water prices doubled. A covenantal response to that is to say, “Let’s work with local communities to meet their needs now instead of pressing on towards jam tomorrow,” so if a wind farm is created in the vicinity of a community with the consent or ownership of that community, the community should benefit financially.

We must also acknowledge that many of our constituents will be reliant on oil and gas for decades to come. In my constituency of North Northumberland, for example, 14,000 properties are not on the gas grid. Let us rebuild our energy security and supply using a realistic mix of options, and let us leave everything on the table so that it serves everyone.

In conclusion, the dead end of unfettered market capitalism has been broken by its own failure to deliver decent jobs and affordable energy. We all now need our future to be built on something that brings both economic security and restored social relationships. In short, we need covenant. The Labour mission was never simply to get on in life, but for all of us to share in prosperity and common endeavour. Nye Bevan once said:

“We have to build a party that is capable of expressing the desires of the people who sent us here—not just their immediate desires, but their deeper longings for a just and generous society.”

The task is to build on this King’s Speech and create both a story and programme that speaks to these longings in work, welfare and energy. To do this, all of us —Government, party and country—need to commit to a new social covenant.