Budget Resolutions

Debate between Suella Braverman and John Hayes

Tuesday 3rd November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

This Budget might be described as the “John Lennon Budget”—it expects us to imagine a better future. Actually, the Chancellor’s performance was more like a better Lennon lyric:

“Life is what happens to you

While you’re busy making other plans”,

because this Budget was long on platitudinous plans and short on decisive delivery. Leaving aside the self-evident exponential crisis of welfare spending—I say self-evident, but perhaps I should explain that benefits are due to hit £431 billion—there are three macroeconomic weaknesses in the Budget, which I will seek briefly to highlight.

The Prime Minister may say that he has to wait for the Milburn and Timms reviews, but while he is doing so and those plans are being hatched, 13.5% of all young people in the UK were not in education, employment or training in January to March this year. One million people aged 16 to 24 are without a job, training or education. To echo the comments of the hon. Member for Widnes and Halewood (Derek Twigg), this is a waste of talent on a scale that is a national scandal. The Budget represented a wasted opportunity to address those issues and, in particular, to build the skills that might enable those people to gain a necessary job. The failure to address that may become the defining characteristic of this Administration.

These are not new problems. I was the Skills Minister, as some people in the Chamber will know. I was well aware of the root causes of NEETs and how we might address them. We managed to reduce the number that we inherited in 2010 by almost 300,000 by 2015, and I was also able also to build up the number of apprenticeships to the greatest number in modern times: over 500,000. Since then, that number has dwindled. It is only by equipping people with skills that have economic value—skills that allow them to the best they can be—that we can also sustain an economy which is desperate for those skills.

What successive Governments have done instead is to import labour. Every time we import labour and every time we make it easier to do so, we displace the investment in our own workforce, both in the young people I described and in the existing workers who need to be reskilled or upskilled. The myth was perpetuated, largely by the Treasury—

[Suella Braverman (Fareham and Waterlooville) (Reform)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Sir John Hayes]

I am always happy to give way to my right hon. and learned Friend.

[Suella Braverman]

My right hon. Friend is making a very powerful speech. Does he share my disappointment and dismay with this fact—that, for every young Brit who is hired today, 27 young foreign workers are hired? Young people are being locked out of the labour market because of mass immigration.

[Sir John Hayes]

My right hon. and learned Friend is absolutely right. Young people are being forced to compete with those foreign workers for a scarce number of jobs. The only people who support that policy are dim-witted bourgeoise liberals and hard-hearted plutocrats, because both of them glory in the idea of foreign labour. That foreign labour is edging Britons out of jobs and, by so doing, weakening our economy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Suella Braverman (Fareham and Waterlooville) (Reform)]

One million—that is the number of young people who are not in education, employment or training. Youth unemployment stands at 14%. That is a scandal and a crisis. Far from giving young people hope, this Budget throws them under a bus, frankly, because it is fundamentally unfair. We are losing a generation.

This Budget is unfair to the 16-year-old who has finished their GCSEs and wants to start working, but who faces zero opportunities to find an apprenticeship or learn a skill. It is unfair and offers no hope to the 21-year-old who has done the right thing and studied for a degree, but who has come out with a qualification that is not opening any doors and has instead saddled them with crippling debt and directed them to the welfare office to claim out-of-work benefits.

This Budget is also unfair to the British taxpayer, who currently lays out £22 billion a year in student loan payments. That is a taxpayer who will see hundreds of billions of pounds never repaid; a taxpayer who faces chronic shortages in our labour market, particularly in the NHS, construction and hospitality. We have a lost generation, and this Budget does nothing for our young people.

[Sir John Hayes]

My right hon. and learned Friend will know that we need to recalibrate our economy around the highest level of skills. Too many young people are directed into academic education—I use “academic” in the broadest sense—only to find themselves jobless, and too few have the opportunity to learn something vocational, technical or practical that would give them the chance to get a job and not take on huge debts.

[Suella Braverman]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. That is exactly the point that I am about to make.

How did we get to this youth unemployment crisis? For the past 30 years, starting with Tony Blair, we have sold one promise to young people: that they need to get a degree, regardless of what it is or where it is from, and they will be set up for life. However, for so many young people today, that has been exposed as a lie. We have 700,000 graduates currently unemployed, some 400,000 of whom are claiming welfare. Average graduate debt stands at £50,000, average graduate salaries are falling, and graduate hiring is disappearing.

For many of those young people, it is not so much that they have taken out a student loan; they have been saddled with a life sentence. It is no wonder they cannot start saving, buy a house, get married or think of starting a family. They are being crippled by the system, and this Budget does nothing to support them.