Youth Unemployment

Sarah Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Dame Diana Johnson]

I will make some progress, because many Back Benchers want to speak.

The skills White Paper sets out our plan to build a more specialised and more efficient higher education sector that will better meet the needs of the economy. The graduate economic inactivity rate is now at its lowest on record, and we want to build on that. We recognise the need for modern technical skills, and not just the old academic subjects. I saw that for myself at the Ron Dearing university technical college in Hull only last week—young people honing their skills and getting a brilliant education.

No matter what path young people choose, we want them to have the skills to succeed. Skills are vital in the world of work today, but more than a quarter of all vacancies are skills shortage vacancies. That is why, last year, the Prime Minister set out our bold ambition for two thirds of young people to enter higher-level education or training. We have added adult skills to the Department for Work and Pension’s brief, to help us join up employment support and skills more closely, so that young people have genuine pathways into good jobs. We are significantly expanding sector-based work academy programmes—SWAPs—in England and Scotland; there will be more than 145,000 additional places over the next three years. Just today, our colleagues at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology announced a new package to give people the skills that will enable them to seize the opportunities that artificial intelligence will bring. That includes an expansion of free AI foundation training for all workers, to upskill 10 million people by 2030. All this is about opening up opportunities for young people.

However, we want to make sure that no stone is left unturned. Last month, the Government unveiled our national youth strategy, which is backed by £500 million. It will rebuild the youth services that the Conservative party decimated, and help more young people transition into adulthood. The Secretary of State has commissioned Alan Milburn to complete a wide-ranging investigation into the causes of youth inactivity, and to come up with policy solutions across the piece. As a former Health Secretary, he is well placed to give particular focus to the role of health in all this. That is needed, because over a quarter of young people not in employment, education or training now cite long-term sickness or disability as a barrier—more than double the figure in 2013-14.

Too many people are shut out of the labour market by disability or ill health. This has worsened, especially since covid, so we are rolling out a £1 billion Pathways to Work offer, which brings together programmes such as Connect to Work, which my hon. Friend the Member for Dartford (Jim Dickson) referred to and which I have seen in action in Lewisham, where I met a neurodiverse young man who told me that the personalised support that he was receiving from the team was helping him to stay in work; and WorkWell, which is providing really impressive integrated work and health support that I recently had a chance to see in Cambridge. Pathways to Work will ultimately guarantee access to work, health and skills support for disabled people and those with long-term health conditions who are claiming out-of-work benefits. We already have 1,000 Pathways to Work advisers on hand to provide better one-to-one support. We know that prevention is better than cure, so we want to avoid people falling out of work due to ill health wherever possible, and employers have a unique role to play.

[Sarah Smith (Hyndburn) (Lab)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that while it is easy to debate who is getting it right and who is getting it wrong, fundamentally, we require a systemic shift in how we look at the problem, which is generational and intergenerational? Everything that she is outlining shows that we are taking a systemic view, to get to the cause of these problems, so that we can finally move forward for the generations that have been let down. We did not have that approach from the previous Government.

[Dame Diana Johnson]

Those are very wise words from my hon. Friend.

I want to say something about employers, because they have a vital role to play in all this. On keeping people in work when they develop an illness or a disability, we are really pleased that we are working with over 100 Vanguard employers to take forward the recommendations in Sir Charlie Mayfield’s “Keep Britain Working” review, and helping to create a picture of what best practice looks like when it comes to building healthy and inclusive workplaces. We have had an outstanding response from businesses, because they know that when their workers win, they win too. Contrary to what some people say and believe, the interests of employees and employers are not diametrically opposed. Everybody wins when workers are secure, happy and healthy.

That leads me on to the Employment Rights Act 2025, which includes reforms such as the extension of statutory sick pay, so that more people can take the time they need to recover, instead of risking longer-term absences. That is not just good for workers; it is good for businesses, too.

I want to address the issue of national insurance contributions and business rates. Let us be clear: employers generally do not have to pay any employer national insurance contributions for employees under the age of 21 or for apprentices under 25. Yesterday we announced that every pub and live music venue will get 15% off its new business rates bill. That is on top of the support announced at the Budget. Bills will then be frozen, in real terms, for a further two years. This Government will always support businesses, giving them the stability that they need to grow, and to create good jobs.

Before I finish, there is one other thing I want to talk about. What happens at the start of people’s working lives can have many consequences for their future, and the same is true of what happens in our childhood. When a young person ends up out of work or training, it is no use pretending that that has suddenly come about in a bubble. Someone who grows up poor is less likely to do well at school and more likely to be a NEET. Poverty, low attainment and low aspiration can not only waste the potential of a young life, but cascade on to the next generation. Shockingly, the number of children in poverty increased by over 900,000 under the Conservatives, which is shameful, and they now come to this House to ask why a generation is struggling.

We are very proud to be lifting the two-child limit. That will have benefits for hundreds of thousands of children, who will be less likely to experience mental health issues, less likely to be unemployed, and more likely to be in work and earning more, yet the Conservatives oppose it. As ever, they seem determined to pull the rug out from under the next generation, and does that not sum them up? They blame; we support. They complain; we fix. They cut; we build.

We will never forget the neglect that left our young people without the hope and opportunity that every generation deserves, but this Government are doing things differently. We are laying the foundations for young people to succeed, and giving them the opportunities that they need and the skills and support to seize them. These opportunities are of course accompanied by obligations to take them up, but that is so much better than a life that is just written off. We are breaking down barriers to opportunity, so that every young person, in every part of our United Kingdom, can fulfil their potential.

Welfare Spending

Sarah Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House regrets the failure of the Government to get people off welfare and into work; believes that reforming the welfare system is a moral mission; and therefore calls on the Government to take urgent action to fix Britain’s welfare system by restricting welfare for non-UK citizens, stopping benefits for those with lower-level mental health conditions, increasing the number of face-to-face assessments, reforming the Motability Scheme so that only those with serious disabilities qualify for a vehicle, and retaining the two-child benefit cap, to get people into employment and build a stronger economy.

All of us surely remember our first job and the moment we got our first paycheque. I was 16, I got paid £40 and I bought myself a pair of shoes. They were nothing fancy, but I remember that feeling. It was the first time I had money in my pocket that I had earned to spend how I pleased. It was a moment of liberation from which there was no going back. Of course, as we get older, it is not so simple. We have more obligations and bills to pay, but the basic fact is the same. Having a job and paying our own way is how we get independence, freedom and agency. We can make our own choices and have a chance to build up our financial security. Not every job takes us on a path paved with gold, but if we are not in work, we do not even have a chance of changing our fortune.

Millions of people up and down the country know what I am talking about. They are the people who get up each morning and go to work, or the people who go to work every evening if they are doing a night shift, while some people are doing both to make ends meet. However, it is not everyone: in fact, it is not a lot of people. Let us look at the numbers. There are 6.5 million people of working age on out-of-work benefits, nearly 1 million young people are not in any form of employment, education or training, and every single day 5,000 people are signing on to long-term sickness benefits with no requirement to work. Those numbers should worry all of us in this place. They are not just statistics; we are talking about people—mums, dads, women in their 50s, young men in their 20s—who are missing out, sat at home rather than at work, and waiting for the handout to drop into their bank account rather than out there putting their shoulder to the wheel.

For every person on benefits and out of work, there are many more who suffer the consequences of worklessness, such as the increasing number of children who are growing up in workless households. More than 1 million children across our country have neither the income nor the culture of work, so worklessness gets passed from one generation to the next, stunting life chances—opportunities, prosperity and longevity—in every sense of the word.

This applies to entire communities: there are large parts of our country where being on benefits is not a rarity, it has become the norm. From our great cities such as Birmingham and Liverpool to historic seaside towns such as Blackpool, around a quarter of the population are in out-of-work benefits. Drop into some of the poorest areas of those cities and you will find communities where the majority of people are on benefits. Think what that means in practice along a street, door after door. And watch out if you are the odd one out actually trying to go to work, as I heard on one of my visits recently. A whole family were yelling at their son, who was trying to break the cycle of worklessness, because his 7 am alarm clock was disturbing their sleep.

As shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, I travel the country talking to people and finding out the facts on the ground. One story that stuck with me is about a young man in his 20s from Bridgend in Wales. He is on benefits, but he got a place on a course at the local college—the exact course he wanted to do. It had the potential to give him skills and transform his life. It could have got him off benefits and into work at the job he really wanted to do, but it did not happen. Why? Because he was terrified of being worse off—that he would lose his personal independence payment and end up broke. That is wrong. And let us be frank: his story is not a one-off. It is going on all around the country. Everywhere, every day, people are deciding they are better off on benefits.

Our welfare system should be a safety net but it has become a welfare trap, condemning people to live off the state rather than off their elbow grease. Of course, help should be there for people who are unable to work or who need a lot of support to do so. In fact, if the system worked better, it might be able to help some people—those who really need it—more. Instead, we have many thousands of people making rational decisions to claim benefits rather than work, the benefits bill rocketing, and still people who are disabled facing a struggle to get help and make ends meet.

[Sarah Smith (Hyndburn) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Lady not recognise that personal independence payment is not a benefit paid on your ability to work—it is paid regardless—so providing that case study is perhaps not the most appropriate to making the argument she is trying progress?

[Helen Whately]

Of course I know that, but if the hon. Lady had talked to as many people who receive PIP as I have, she would know that many people worry that if they go into training or work, they will then, when they are reassessed, lose their PIP. Even though in theory, yes, you can work if you can while you are getting PIP, people worry that because they are working it will be then be seen as them not actually needing it and that they do not actually have that level of health problem. That is why at the moment it is acting, in the way in works, as a barrier and a disincentive to work, and that is why it needs reform.

Reforming welfare is not cruel to people on benefits—quite the opposite. What is cruel is ducking the challenge, accepting the status quo and continuing to spend millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on keeping people on benefits, but that is exactly what the Labour party is doing. Just a few months ago, the Prime Minister and the former Work and Pensions Secretary did have a go at doing something about it. They set out some welfare cuts—rushed and poorly thought-through, as I said at the time—but their Back Benchers were having none of it. We have never seen anything like it. It was the very definition of shambles in this Chamber. Right in the middle of the debate, their savings Bill became a spending Bill, with the Government frantically making concessions that we still live with, such as the Timms review into PIP.

I have a great deal of respect for the Minister for Social Security and Disability, the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms), but what hope can we have for his review when it was conceived as a bargaining chip to buy off angry Back Benchers? It has taken months to even kick off the review and months to come up with the terms of reference. Now we have them, we see that welfare savings are off the table. And yes, I said “savings”, a word the Secretary of State was careful to steer clear of in questions last week. What a situation this is.

The Chancellor keeps talking about welfare savings; she did so again this morning. However, the review by the Minister for Social Security and Disability ruled out making any savings. The Secretary of State will not even utter the word. Who will win this argument? Will it be the hapless Chancellor with her back against the wall or the wily Welfare Secretary playing a longer game?

While Ministers spar behind the political scenes, the clock is ticking and the benefits bill keeps heading up and up towards £100 billion, with no prospect of the Government slowing that trajectory, let alone actually getting it down. Instead, as the Chancellor as good as told us this morning, the Government will turn to tax rises to fund welfare and more job-destroying, growth-killing policies, reducing opportunities and saddling future generations with the bill, leaving them to pay it off for decades to come. The Government have not only given up on saving money; they have given up on millions of people across Britain.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Bool (South Northamptonshire) (Con)]

Every one of us in this Chamber, and generations of MPs before us, want to help and improve the lives of our constituents. That is why this debate is so important, and we really have to tackle it.

The issues with welfare go back generations. We talk about the welfare state as we know it now, coming in after the second world war with Clement Attlee and the establishment of the NHS, but the history of welfare goes back so much further. The National Insurance Act 1911 introduced insurance against sickness, invalidity and—unusually at that time—unemployment. We can even go back even further than that, to Henry VIII and the abolition of the monasteries; it was the monasteries that used to provide charity and care for the infirm and the needy. Since then, we have seen the development of welfare in various forms, and it is something that we have all struggled with. We saw it with the development of the Poor Law and the friendly societies. It has been an area of great change and it has been going on for generations.

I appreciate that anyone coming to this topic comes with the best of intentions. I think there is consensus that welfare reform is needed, but the way in which the provision of welfare is developed at the moment is entirely damaging both to the public purse and to those who are caught in the welfare net. Today’s welfare state has become like the modern-day helicopter parent. For those who do not know, a helicopter parent is one who hovers over their child like a helicopter in every aspect of their life, managing their experiences and feeling that they always need to be involved in order to solve problems. But we know that is not healthy for the child. They can feel smothered, are unable to develop and become trapped. That is what is happening with our current welfare system; it is trapping people and not giving them opportunities.

[Sarah Smith]

I recently met a constituent who was made unemployed in 2020 during the covid pandemic, and she has struggled ever since to find and hold down a job. She has an autism diagnosis, and it is only since this Government started improving the system that she has had access to a disability-trained job coach, who has supported her to get some volunteering and move into a college course; she now has a job ahead of her. That is what we are doing to grasp the system and tackle its challenges.

[Sarah Bool]

I am very sorry that that was the experience faced by the hon. Lady’s constituent, but it is good that she has managed to get the opportunity to work. That is the thing; that is the difference. Changes need to be made. We have come to the Chamber today to try to find a route through this issue for all of us. That is why my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Essex (Mrs Badenoch) has offered help.

I have a big issue with the language being used in this Chamber all the time. This is a very difficult and sometimes uncomfortable conversation, but it is absolutely essential that we take the action needed. Sentiments like “living within your means”, which I think all our constituents have to do from day to day, should not be replaced by words like “austerity” and then the idea slammed down. That is not helpful to any debate or any of our constituents.

We always ask our constituents to look after their money—money in, money out—and the Government have to do the same. This depends on what our own views of the Government are. There are those who want the Government to be involved in absolutely every element of everyone’s lives—and so be it, but do expect cost rises, inefficiencies and abuse of the system. The most compassionate thing is to put people on the path to take their own opportunities, to have their own jobs and to grow. That is the place we are trying to get to. Sometimes we are too involved, and we are not creating the system of fairness that we all seek.

Given the sums of money that we are talking about, it is even more imperative that we grasp this nettle. It cannot be right or fair that sickness benefit pays £2,500 more a year than the amount received by someone living on the national living wage. A responsible Government have to take proper action to tackle this issue. That is why the Conservative party has come forward with proposals that would reduce spending by £23 billion, through our plan to deliver £47 billion of savings.

The pen sits with the Government. It is entirely with them to take these actions—the actions that constituents are asking for. Rather than dismissing our solutions, as Government Members have constantly done today, perhaps the Government should take some of them on, take up our offer for help and improve the welfare system.

Welfare Reform

Sarah Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Liz Kendall]

My hon. Friend raises a really important point, and it would be really good if she talked to my right hon. Friend the Minister for Social Security and Disability, who is reviewing universal credit, as we promised in our manifesto, to tackle poverty and make work pay. We have to make that a reality for everybody in this country, and I am sure that, if she talks to him, he will speak more about what we are doing in this regard.

[Sarah Smith (Hyndburn) (Lab)]

Last week, my constituent Ellie, who is visually impaired, visited the local jobcentre, but as a full-time student seeking part-time work, she was belittled, spoken over and told that she could not get help because she was on PIP, not on UC. She left feeling devastated by that experience. Can the Secretary of State reassure me and Ellie that such an experience will become a thing of the past for people like her who are desperately seeking work?

[Liz Kendall]

That is absolutely my intention. I ask my hon. Friend to send me the details, because I will look into that personally.

Oral Answers to Questions

Sarah Smith Excerpts

Monday 17th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sir Stephen Timms]

As we have already made clear today, we are absolutely determined to protect those who need to be protected in the proposals we are bringing forward. I think the hon. Lady will welcome and be reassured by the proposals when she sees them.

[Sarah Smith (Hyndburn) (Lab)]

There are currently thousands of disabled children and adults across the country, including in Hyndburn and Haslingden, who cannot access their childhood tax funds. How is the Minister working to address this issue with the Ministry of Justice to help families to gain quick and easy access to these funds? Will he give further consideration to increasing the scope of the DWP appointee scheme to cover child tax funds and junior individual savings accounts up to £5,000?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I welcome my hon. Friend’s interest in this subject, which she and I have met to discuss. She is absolutely right: there should be no barriers to young people and their families accessing these funds. The Ministry of Justice has made some progress already. I do not think the answer will be altering the DWP appointee scheme, but there will be further progress to make things easier.