Youth Unemployment

Lord Palmer of Childs Hill Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend is absolutely right that the opportunities that young people have throughout their lives are dependent on the standards, quality and success that they experience in schools. That is why we have already taken action to ensure that new routes are available for young people post-16—for example, through foundation apprenticeships—and why we have increased the support available to young people in colleges to get the qualifications in English and maths that are so important for them later in life. It is also why, through both Becky Francis’s curriculum and assessment review and the Government’s post-16 skills and education White Paper, we will have more to say about how we ensure that there are clear, successful routes for all our young people post-16.

[Lord Palmer of Childs Hill (LD)]

My Lords, I am disappointed to hear the Minister, in discussing youth unemployment, mention universal credit and other such things. I ask the Minister to consider whether—as I would have thought—one of the basic ways of reducing youth unemployment is to encourage and introduce more apprentices. If only we had people who were encouraged financially by the Government in plumbing, electrical work and all the trades that people need; instead, we are using people from overseas because we are not training anyone. Are the Government giving financial incentives to the plumbers, electricians and so on to train the tradespeople for the future?