Welfare Reform

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness raises a very important point about face-to-face assessments. There used to be face-to-face assessments; they were stopped during Covid and restarted only slowly and at quite a low level. We have said publicly that we want to ramp those back up again, so she raises an important point. On the Motability scheme, just for clarity, nothing in the proposals in the Bill now or in earlier incarnations affects the mobility element of PIP, only the daily living allowance, but I take her broader point and I will be happy to have a look at that.

[Lord Shipley (LD)]

My Lords, I will ask the Minister a very specific question about young people. The Statement says that almost 1 million young people are not in education, employment or training—they are NEETs. It then says that that is one in eight of all young people. That figure is true if you count 16 to 24 year-olds, but if you take 18 to 24 year-olds, it is 14.8%, which amounts to one in seven of our young people. Indeed, over the past five years, as the Minister probably knows, the number has been rising. One of the big problems is that 29% of 16 to 24 year-olds with a disability are NEET, but only 9% of that age range without a disability are NEET. What are the Government planning to do to help young people, far too many of whom are not in education, employment or training?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, because that is a really important point. We should all be worried about the number of young people who are not in education, employment or training. What chance do you have in your adult life if you do not get anything at the start? He also raised an important point about why. The truth is that the evidence takes you so far.

We are bringing in a youth guarantee for all 18 to 21 year-olds to ensure that they can easily access quality training, an apprenticeship or help to find work. We will also shortly be running trailblazers around the country for 12 months and we will use them to inform the design. They will try different things, because we want to try to find out what works for different kinds of young people. We talk about young people as though they are all the same, and of course they clearly are not. Some young people who are severely disabled will never work and we will need to give them appropriate support. There may be others who are having, for example, mental or some physical health challenges and, with the appropriate support, health support, encouragement and other forms of local support, they could begin to move back towards the workplace. I am really looking forward, as the pilots start to be evaluated, to finding evidence about what works, taking that out and changing things.