Youth Unemployment

Jayne Kirkham Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Joy Morrissey]

This is a youth unemployment crisis of Labour’s own making. It is because of the national insurance tax hikes and the restrictions on business—

[Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Joy Morrissey]

I will make some progress. The crisis will continue to be a problem that this Government face—mark my words.

Turning to my constituency of Beaconsfield, Marlow and the South Bucks villages, we have an incredible restaurant in Beaconsfield called The Greyhound. I strongly urge everyone to go to eat there. It has a wonderful apprenticeship programme that helps young people get their first job in hospitality, providing them with an incredible opportunity. I went to speak to them and they said, “This is great. I wasn’t enjoying school and I now have an opportunity for a career in hospitality. I am trained in every level of hospitality.” They gave me a tour of the wine cellar and everything in between. They love it and are passionate about it.

The Greyhound tells me, however, that many businesses, and not just The Greyhound, cannot continue their apprenticeship programme because of the backdrop of the national insurance tax raid and an eye-watering hike in their business rates. They simply cannot continue the very successful programme that has changed young people’s lives.

This is a Government who failed to listen to the urgent calls of businesses to stop their Employment Rights Act, which will destroy jobs while creating rights for jobs that will no longer exist. Young people need businesses to be able to create jobs for them and not be hamstrung by tax and employment policies that force employers to curtail opportunity. This is also a Government who sow utter chaos in our apprenticeship system at every turn.

With Labour Governments, rising youth unemployment —indeed, all unemployment—becomes a sad inevitability. Yet different choices can change that course for our young people and create a better future. Lowering business taxes to enable businesses to create jobs will help tackle the problem, as will putting evidence before ideology in education so that standards rise and do not collapse, and scrapping business rates on the high street. We will see many people coming back, many businesses coming back and many young people being employed. It will be a tremendous win for this Government if they try that.

The Government should also try reducing the tax burden for anybody under the age of 25. If they scrap the national insurance contribution for under-25s, this Government will see a tremendous rise in young people taking their first job with a business, because the risk is reduced for that business. Instead, we are forcing over-regulation on to businesses, crippling and closing them, and curtailing opportunities for young people. We should create an apprenticeship system built on aspiration that is about employment choice and stability, so that we continue to build on the great work that had already started and give young people an opportunity to get their first job and start their career. That is the future our young people deserve.

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[Graham Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman makes a fair and reasonable point, but if he goes back and looks through the data, he will see that youth unemployment stayed stubbornly high under the last quasi-socialist Government, and it was not just because of the 2008 crash. The truth is that, throughout that period, we had a much higher level of youth unemployment than we should have done. He says that we had austerity, but the then Government overspent. We inherited a massive deficit and slowly brought it down throughout the 2010s, but we overspent in each and every year, so the idea that we had austerity is a myth. “Austerity” means living within our means, but we did not live within our means. We overspent each and every year, but by the time we got to covid, we had managed to get our deficit right down. We showed fiscal responsibility, because we know that if Governments spend money that they do not generate, they impose a burden on the very young people on whom unemployment is now being imposed.

I will deal with the minimum wage, which Labour Members have touched on. They asked whether we want to tell young people that they are not worth higher pay. Well, if they do not have the experience, and if they lose out on getting a job against an older person because they do not even have cost competitiveness, they are in trouble. Since the introduction of the development rate in 1998, there has been a lower wage for younger workers. That is deliberate, for a very sensible reason: when young people enter the workplace, they are doing exactly that—they are developing. They are developing skills, confidence, discipline and the ability to work productively alongside more experienced colleagues. Employers were explicitly permitted to pay less in order to reflect an economic reality.

[Jayne Kirkham]

rose—

[Graham Stuart]

I do not doubt the good intentions of the Labour party, the Cabinet and the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Jayne Kirkham), who I may allow to intervene in a moment, but good intentions do not disguise the truth. They have not run businesses, and it shows. They do not understand how employers make decisions or how behaviour is incentivised. By abolishing the development rate, the Chancellor wanted to signal that she is on the side of young people in order to put in place a political divide: “You Tories don’t want to pay young people a fair and decent wage!” Of course we do, but we want them to have jobs. This is the insider-outsider issue that my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) touched on earlier.

The effect that the Chancellor has had is the opposite of what she desired, and she is not helping young people. Many have received a short-term pay rise, but hundreds of thousands have received the ultimate kick in the teeth. They have received not a pay cut, but no pay at all, because the jobs they should have been offered have disappeared in a puff of the Chancellor’s smoke.

After the Government’s first Budget, a survey by the Beverley and District chamber of trade found that 88% of its members said they would be less likely to employ young people because of the rise in the minimum wage. Despite that warning, the Chancellor returned with a second Budget and destroyed even more opportunities with another £26 billion tax raid. We can but pray that she is out the door before she completes her tax-taking trilogy. If the Chancellor changes nothing, we need to change the Chancellor.

What would the Conservatives do differently? We would start with a simple truth: jobs are created by employers—by not Ministers, schemes or programmes. Private employers are the ones who generate wealth. The ladder of opportunity is not built by ministerial good intentions; it is built by creating incentives for the behaviours we want. The behaviour we want from employers is for them to take a risk, and to feel that it is worth their while for their family to invest in and give an opportunity to a young person. But under this Government, the first rung of the ladder is being sawn off. Young people do not begin at the top; they begin with a Saturday job or a summer shift, and their first payslip. That is where confidence is built, habits are formed and futures are forged. When those jobs disappear, the ladder does not get longer; it just gets shorter and steeper.

A Conservative Government will abolish business rates for retail, hospitality and leisure—not 10% of them, but 100%. Those are the sectors in which so many young people take their first step. Cutting costs gives businesses the freedom to grow and hire, and we do not need a vast number of people to administer a scheme. When we simply lower the costs for employers, they get on with it. That will create real opportunities for young people to learn, earn and prove themselves.

Under Labour, businesses face another three years of higher and higher costs, heavier regulation and constant uncertainty, leaving young people blocked, frustrated and struggling to get a foothold in the job market. We will repeal Labour’s job-destroying Employment Rights Act, because we cannot regulate our way to prosperity. The Act introduced 28 major reforms—count them—placing significant new requirements on businesses. By the Government’s own estimate, it will lead to £5 billion in costs.

The planned changes to zero-hours contracts are perhaps the most damaging to young people, because employees will require guaranteed hours and compensation for cancelled shifts. I fully accept that these measures are well-intentioned, but they will reduce the flexibility that employers value, and that young people also value because they can balance their studies with gaining experience. Businesses will hire fewer young workers, leaving a generation without the chance to learn, earn and prove themselves.

[Jayne Kirkham]

rose—

[Graham Stuart]

I hope the hon. Lady will say now on the Floor of the House that if the youth unemployment rate continues to go up, as it did under previous Labour Governments, from the 14% inherited from the Conservatives to 20%—if that were to be the terrible outcome, with its scarring impact on young people—she would not seek to stand for the Labour party at the next election, because she would recognise that she had failed us.

[Jayne Kirkham]

As an ex-employment lawyer—in fact, I was an equity partner in a law firm that employed 50 people, so I do have some experience—I remember that when the minimum wage came in in 1998, the figure for over-21s was the same, but the Conservative party changed that, so that those under 25 were paid less, although people’s rent does not cost less when they are 24. There is still a differential for under-21s of £2 an hour, so how can the right hon. Member say that that differential is no longer there when it still exists?

[Graham Stuart]

The differential has been eroded, but the hon. Lady is quite right to mention that. What we are talking about is balance. None of us is talking about a total free-for-all for employers. We are looking at getting balance, and it looks as though that balance has gone wrong, as the hon. Lady must know. What have been the great external economic shocks over the last year and a half? There have not really been any. There is no reason, other than the policies of this Government, for this increase in youth unemployment, with the loss of nearly 100,000 jobs in hospitality. This is about getting the balance right, and this Government have not done so.

The Conservatives will align incentives, cut costs and free businesses to hire—to get the balance right—and in doing so, we will give them the freedom to give young people a chance to prove themselves, because Conservative Governments stand for work, not welfare, and for opportunity, not dependency.

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[Lewis Cocking]

My right hon. Friend makes an incredible point, and that is precisely what businesses tell me. As I have said, it comes as no surprise to any of my constituents or businesses in Broxbourne—it is a surprise only to the Chancellor and the Labour party—that if the Government tax jobs more, there will be fewer jobs. The Opposition have been making that point. I am always surprised when Labour MPs come out and say that they have spoken to businesses in their constituency and everything seems fine. They should speak to businesses that have a Conservative MP, because they would hear a completely different message.

More people in decent, sustainable employment and a life off benefits is better for our economy and our public finances. To show young people that there can be a better future, we must change the economic model to reward employment properly and change our education system so that young people are prepared for the world of work.

We should be more creative about what we are asking young people to learn at school. Countless employers in my constituency have told me that, when they hire school leavers, they lack important skills such as writing an email, speaking with customers over the phone, and understanding basic finance and the language of contracts. It is not that young people today cannot or will not develop those skills, nor is it the fault of our brilliant teachers; the curriculum simply is not geared to preparing young people for work in the modern world. We should be inviting local businesses, entrepreneurs and employers into schools more regularly so that they can share their knowledge and experience to encourage students to think about how they can get their ideas off the ground and what it takes to run a viable business.

When I asked about this issue before, I was told by a Government Minister from the Dispatch Box that it is the Government who create economic growth in this country. Let me say gently to the Government that it is not they, nor us as MPs, who create economic growth in this country; it is all our constituents across the United Kingdom who take a risk, put their ideas forward, create jobs and economic growth locally, and employ lots of people.

In school, students could learn about marketing, economics, maths and law, all without knowing that they are actually learning those skills and all without a textbook in sight. That sort of system would help our young people to navigate the crucial period after leaving school and make them more attractive to employers. I have seen fantastic work at the Broxbourne school, which teaches a business T-level in which students go out into the world of work and have an apprenticeship alongside learning in the classroom. That is what we need to gear our education system towards: preparing young people better for the world of work in the 21st century.

I went through my whole education in the United Kingdom under new Labour and Tony Blair, and I remember Tony Blair saying that he wanted half of all young people to go to university. University might be the right choice for some young people in this country, but it is not the right choice for everybody. When I was choosing what I would do after school, the word “apprenticeship” was not even in the school’s vocabulary. There was no offer of an apprenticeship. School leavers then either went to university or fell off the edge of a cliff and did nothing. That record, from when new Labour was in power, is not one that I would be proud of; I think Labour Members need to reflect on what they did last time they were in government, because it clearly did not work then and it is not going to work now.

[Jayne Kirkham]

The hon. Gentleman must be really pleased, then, about the Prime Minister’s new target of two thirds of young people being in either higher education or apprenticeships and training.

[Lewis Cocking]

Of course I am pleased about that target, but anyone can stand at the Dispatch Box, set a target and make it sound good. We want action on the ground. The Government have been in power for 18 months, and when I speak to my constituents, including young people, they say, “We don’t see action.” We need to move faster and further on this.

[Jayne Kirkham]

The hon. Gentleman must also be pleased to see the further education White Paper, which will put some of those things into action.

[Lewis Cocking]

I would gently say to the hon. Lady that her party colleagues had 13 years to come up with a plan for government when they were in opposition. That paper should have landed the day after the general election; that is when the Government should have been getting on with it, not 18 months down the line. My message to the Government is clear: yes, make the obvious tax changes that businesses from all our constituencies are crying out for, but also show that you are serious about creating economic growth, tackling youth unemployment and bringing forward fundamental changes to education.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jayne Kirkham Excerpts

Monday 8th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Torsten Bell]

I thank my hon. Friend for her important question. We have seen poverty rates fall less fast among people approaching the state pension age, rather than those over it. We need to look across the range of policy levers to address that, which includes growing the economy so that wages are rising and building houses so that people’s housing costs come down.

[Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)]

Cornwall Marine Network in my constituency is a small and medium-sized enterprise members association that provides training and apprenticeship support. It recently celebrated providing 5,000 new jobs and apprenticeships. It will welcome the Government’s youth guarantee and the news that SMEs will not have to pay for apprenticeship training for under-25s. Will the Minister confirm how this Government will increase the capacity of such training providers?

[Pat McFadden]

I warmly commend my hon. Friend and the company she mentions. One of the apprenticeship reforms that we have announced is fully funding apprenticeships for SMEs for under-25s. That will help companies such as the one she mentions, and many more besides.

Pension Schemes Bill

Jayne Kirkham Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 3rd December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Kirsty Blackman]

I would like to see much more conversation. Gateway benefits allow people eligibility for other things, and sometimes those do not work either. A person might be eligible for universal credit, but they do not necessarily get the follow-through to free school meals, for example. Anything we can do to make that path smoother, either in the cessation of benefits or in agreement on eligibility, would be really helpful. I agree with the hon. Gentleman; we have seen issues with carers, for example, being chased for overpayments that were not their fault.

Again, I support the Government’s move on the consolidation of small pots, which I think is incredibly sensible. I am famously a massive supporter of the pensions dashboard and have never been at all critical of its timelines, but when it comes online there will be a rush for consolidation anyway. This is all about consolidation for people who have not touched their small pots, and making sure they get a return from that is totally sensible.

Guided retirement and the mid-life MOT are mentioned in a number of amendments, and ensuring that people are given the correct advice at the correct time is incredibly important. When the Government do their sufficiency review—when we are looking at the adequacy of pensions and what people will get when they hit retirement—I would be very surprised if that and the consultation do not conclude that more people need more advice earlier. The more advice that people have on their pension, and the more money they put into their pension at the earliest time, the bigger their pension will be.

I have already mentioned compound interest: if we put £100 into our pension when we were 21, it will be significantly bigger by the time we retire than if we put £100 into our pension when we are 40. That is just a fact. The more advice that we can give people at various important life stages, but particularly significantly before retirement, would be really helpful. That is another thing that should be included.

Finally, the hon. Member for Boston and Skegness (Richard Tice) spoke at a press conference about the local government pension scheme and how terrible it is that it is spending so much money on fees. That was in September, after Second Reading, at which he did not speak about that. He did not table any amendments on it before the Committee stage, and he has not shown up to raise it on Report. It is almost as if Reform MPs are saying things in press conferences and not doing any actual work. [Interruption.] I told him I was going to mention him. It is almost as if they make statements in press conferences and do not do anything, just as they have not shown up today.

Should a Reform Member have been particularly keen to make changes to the LGPS—such as to cap the level of fees it can pay, which are probably not unreasonable, as the LGPS is phenomenally successful in its returns for members—they could have amended the Bill, but they would have had to show up to do so. I suggest that the media organisations who are happy to cover press conferences ask the Members giving those press conferences what they will actually do to get their policies implemented. If such Members have an opportunity, they should use it rather than just shouting from the sidelines.

As I think I have made clear, I am largely supportive of an awful lot of things in the Bill, the direction of travel and many of the technical measures, which are great fun to have a good look at. I have some concerns about pre-1997 indexation. I am delighted that it has happened, but more could have been done. I will be interested to follow the progress of the fiduciary duty statutory guidance and the sufficiency and adequacy review and whether there will be mandation powers.

Lastly, on new clause 3, can we please make it easier for members who are terminally ill to have that conversation? I would very much appreciate the Minister committing to taking that away and considering how the PPF and FAS can get that information more easily without requiring people to jump through significant hoops.

[Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)]

I welcome the real progress made on the pre-1997 fund. I do not have as much specific technical knowledge as most hon. Members in the Chamber, and I was not on the Bill Committee, but I have looked at the amendments and would like to comment on them, as I was lucky enough to chair a local government pension scheme committee—I think it was very well run—and sit on a pool oversight board. I will use that experience as an example.

Our LGPS in Cornwall was a good example of responsible investment and good practice in the sector. The Bill will consolidate LGPS funds into six pools from eight on the basis that that will be effective in achieving scale and diversification of assets and cost savings. Brunel—the pool that Cornwall is in—is not to go forward. Forming Brunel was costly and, as I said on Second Reading, the Cornwall fund was due to break even following the forming of that pool only this year. The costs involved in moving to another fund are expected to be high, which concerns me, as that may impact members, though we hope those costs will be recouped by investment growth as a result of the consolidation.

Being in a bigger pool did enable funds to invest in local infrastructure such as housing, transport and clean energy. Cornwall was good at that: we used our £2.3 billion—not a huge fund when we think of the size of many of these pools—to invest in affordable rental housing near Camborne, where 67 new homes were built on a brownfield site. I am looking forward to seeing the infrastructure projects that further consolidation will make possible.

On Second Reading, I raised concerns that moving to larger funds may affect local links. Brunel is a strong south-west pool and, although it covers as far up as Oxford, we have managed within that pool to be effective on a local level.

The Environment Agency—I noted the amendment on that—was part of our pool, and it did have slightly different rules, which was tricky and somewhat impacted on our pool. I am pleased that the scheme managers will now have a duty to co-operate with strategic authorities, as the inability to do that often led to perhaps unintended consequences. In social housing, for example, we may have been looking at investments that were the same as the local authority’s. It would make sense to be able to talk about such investments so that we are not doing silly things like competing against each other.

In Cornwall, we had a strong responsible investment policy, and our carbon-neutral date was earlier than the rest of the pool by five years. We were able to maintain those policies and our environmental, social and governance focus by having a strong presence on the oversight board, which enabled us to influence the pool and be a bit different within it. I hope that will continue so that pools do not end up following the lowest common denominator when it comes to things like social impact, investment and ESG matters, but instead will be raised up to the highest level. In our local fund, we had employers and employees on our pension committee, and that worked well. The union reps and the employers gave some very valuable input, and I think that would be valuable for the larger pools as well.

Our local social impact fund was, in the end, 7.5% of our investments. We could channel our investment into rented housing and local renewables in Cornwall, as well as more widely around the UK, and I hope that local government pension schemes will still be able to set their own local investment targets in that way, even when working with local authorities.

Pension Schemes Bill

Jayne Kirkham Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 7th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is good that, in the local government pension scheme, representatives of both employers and employees can sit on the pension committees, and that we often have trade union representatives on the committees as well?

[Neil Duncan-Jordan]

My hon. Friend is quite right. Trade unions do sit on many of the LGPS committees. I was making the point that it is on the pools where there is less representation for those member voices to be heard, and that is extremely important.

Finally, I want to talk about the pre-1997 pensioners. We know that those who have seen the biggest drop in income are those who built up pensions before 1997. They have not received an annual inflation-linked increase to their pension and, over time, particularly when inflation is high, the value of their pension is eroded. Some 80,000 Pension Protection Fund members, mostly older people and disproportionately women, including some of my constituents, find themselves in this position. I hope the Government will therefore consider legislating to provide inflation protection on pre-1997 benefits, and to give the PPF greater flexibility to use its surplus to give discretionary improvements to members.

In conclusion, the idea that workers’ pension funds can be used to build much-needed social housing and invest in green technology and jobs is something that a progressive Labour Government should be proud of, and I hope we can ensure that the Bill delivers a win for pensioners, a win for our environment and a win for society as a whole.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)]

Having been lucky enough to chair a local government pension scheme committee and sit on a pool oversight board—purely because I was the only person left on the committee after the election, I think—I would like to talk about the Bill’s impact on local government pension schemes.

The Bill would consolidate LGPS funds into six pools, on the basis that that would be effective in achieving scale, diversification of assets and cost savings. LGPSs were recently merged into eight pools by the last Government, of course. Cornwall’s pool contained nine LGPSs from the south-west and the Environment Agency. It took a number of years to set up and transfer the funds over to the pool. Setting-up costs meant that the consolidation savings from acting at scale are starting to show only now, a few years later. Hiring an extra tier of staff on top of the LGPS staff, who were still needed to administer the fund, correspond with members and employers, and manage the investments, was expensive. Closing down our current pool and joining another is likely to be the same. There are also concerns, which I would like the Minister to address, that going to a larger pool may affect that local link. We have a strong south-west pool at present, and removing that link and scattering us across the country could impact the effectiveness of our pool at making local investments. That is what I want to talk about next.

Bringing schemes together enables them to invest in bigger local projects, from infrastructure to clean energy. That boosts returns for savers and helps communities. Cornwall was very good at that. We used our £2.3 billion, which is not a huge fund when we think about the size of the pools that we are talking about now, to do precisely that kind of thing.

Other Members have talked about responsible investment. We had a very strong responsible investment policy, and our carbon-neutral target date was earlier than that of the rest of the pool. We were able to maintain those policies and our environment, social and governance focus by having a strong presence on the oversight board. That enabled us to influence the pool. I hope that this influence will continue, so that pools are not dragged down to the lowest common denominator when it comes to ESG matters and responsible investment, but will instead be raised up.

Our local social impact fund was, in the end, 7.5% of our investments. We were able to channel our LGPS investment into affordable private rental housing and local renewables in Cornwall, as well as renewables more widely around the UK. Will local government pension schemes still be able to set their own targets in the pool in this way and do their own thing? Although we worked closely with the pool to ensure that pooling delivered scale advantages, we wanted to make sure that our local impact portfolio, as part of our social impact allocation, enabled us to combine our fiduciary responsibilities to our members with delivering that social and environmental positive change in Cornwall, where we were, and where our members worked and lived. That had a massive impact on how the funds were viewed locally. We hoped that it would provide a framework for others to follow, but within our pool of 10, we were the only ones who did it. Will the Minister confirm that local LGPSs will be able to set their own targets in a bigger pool, even if the area is geographically disparate?

I want to mention the measures that require regulations for the LGPS to include a duty for administering authorities to work with strategic authorities in their area to identify opportunities for investment. When we ran our social impact fund, it was difficult to organise that at arm’s length. Members who were part of the local authority wanted to direct where all investments went, but that had to be done at arm’s length through investment fund managers, who have little connection to the area. It was hard to stand back and watch them do that. How will the fiduciary duty allow local government pension scheme administration authorities to work with the strategic authorities in their area, particularly if, as in Cornwall, they are one and the same? Cornwall unitary authority was exactly the same size and had the same authority as the administrating authority of the LGPS.

To conclude, the scheme worked well in Cornwall and provided good results. I still drive past the houses in Camborne that were built by our local government pension scheme; local people live in them, doing local jobs. The good results were mainly down to good officers, to be honest, and a flexible pool that allowed us to do our own thing and take our own route. I hope that that freedom will remain under the Bill.

Mansion House Accord

Jayne Kirkham Excerpts

Tuesday 13th May 2025 Commons Chamber

[Torsten Bell]

The job of pension trustees is absolutely to deliver for their savers and the accord today is delivering exactly that, making sure that we have diversity of asset allocations in our pension schemes. So the answer to the hon. Member’s question is yes.

[Jayne Kirkham (Truro and Falmouth) (Lab/Co-op)]

The shadow Chancellor spoke about public sector workers benefiting from this kind of investment. Before I came to the House, I was the chair of the Cornwall local government pension scheme, which very successfully invested 7.5% in local and social impact investments—in local renewables and local affordable housing. Will the Minister ensure that more of that happens in the future?

[Torsten Bell]

I thank my hon. Friend for her question. We should focus on the accord today, but the LGPS is a very important part of our pensions landscape; there are £400 billion-worth of assets under management, rising to £1 trillion-worth over the next two decades. It is right that we build on the LGPS track record of local investment to make sure that we get the absolute best value for that investment both for taxpayers in local areas and for local communities. That is exactly what our reforms will do—we will be coming forward with the final details in the pension investment review final report in the coming weeks—to make sure that we have bigger, professional, well-governed and locally investing pension pools.