Welfare Reforms and Youth Unemployment

Lord Sentamu Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, the interim independent review by Alan Milburn into young people and work, and young people not in education, employment or training, is absolutely shocking. On the acronym, I would say that I am guilty as charged, but is the acronym appropriate? I am not a lover of acronyms. Given the many accents of our union, “NEET” could easily be pronounced in a way that may mean something that is not intended—I could try that out, but time does not allow me. It is not an inviting acronym for the young people of the United Kingdom who are not in work or employment.

Reading Alan Milburn’s interim report reminded me of the question Queen Elizabeth famously asked economists at the London School of Economics. After receiving a briefing on the unprecedented magnitude of the financial crisis and the resultant global credit crunch, she asked, “Why did nobody see the awful financial crash coming if it was that big?” A group of leading economists sent her a three-page letter explaining that the crisis was caused by a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people. For young people who are not in education, employment or training and who are claiming health and disability benefits, the crisis we face now has been caused by a similar failure of the collective imagination of many bright people.

What can we do? How do we lift our young people out of this deep quagmire they find themselves in? The interim report is a wake-up call for us all. Let me take us all, in hearts and minds, to the northern province of York, to hear what we have tried to do to change young people so that they can develop wonderful habits of the heart through commands given in our schools and colleges, so that they do not end up among the 1 million young people not in education, employment or training. For most of us, we learned the habits we now practise from how we lived, not from somebody telling us about them across a long distance. Archbishop Desmond Tutu helped officially inaugurate the Archbishop of York Youth Trust in 2009, which has gone on to help a lot of young people. It trains them to be leaders, empowering them from year 6 to post-16, so they can be real leaders in their communities.

I strongly believe that young people are not our leaders of tomorrow but our leaders of today. Young people and children can make a positive and transformative difference to their local communities. For example, a group of 50 young people living in a very deprived area asked 500 homes with older people, “What do you want to get at Christmas to keep you warm?” The answer was very simple: woollen jumpers and fleeces. The young people contacted the businesses in their community, which supplied all the goods they needed. Then they went to those homes and gave the older people jumpers and fleeces. In an area that was so troubled by truanting and bad behaviour, suddenly these older people saw the young people as friends and no longer as a menace. I could give endless examples, but time does not allow me.

When Alan Milburn’s final review is published, it will be crucial to see young people as key players in becoming the change they want to see, turning their eyes to the horizon of hope. May all our work with children and young people be similar to that of Isaac Newton, who saw ground-breaking discoveries in physics and mathematics and built on the earlier work of his predecessors, writing:

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”.


May we become those giants, so that young people can stand on our shoulders and then learn to be leaders and help other young people.