Welfare Reforms and Youth Unemployment

Lord Blackwater Excerpts

Thursday 11th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Blackwater (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to follow my noble friend Lord Elliott, and I congratulate my noble friend Lord Evans on the excellent way he presented this debate and the figures he set out. He touched a real nerve with me because, like him, my first job was working in a pub, and I feel that I probably learned much more there than I did at the university I went to afterwards.

I want to agree with the present Prime Minister, who spoke a year ago of a “moral imperative” to fix the welfare state—ironically, hours after being forced to U-turn on benefit reforms. He promised that there would be reforms but, he said, in a “Labour way”. A year later, we still are waiting keenly to see what that way is.

As my noble friend Lord Hannan said, we must treat causes and not symptoms. Nothing will help young people find work and contribute to society—as, according to the Milburn report, 84% of them long to do, as the right reverend Prelate said—better than a taxation and regulatory system allowing businesses to create such jobs. Currently, young people are priced out of work, particularly, as we have heard, in the hospitality and retail sectors.

Worse, as the noble Lord, Lord Austin, said, some develop psychological frailties because they cannot work. The moral imperative must be to help them by finding them jobs. Among the barrage of statistics, one is deeply alarming: the proportion of those not in employment, education or training and diagnosed with a work-limiting health condition has risen from 26% to 44% since 2015. Psychological conditions account for much of that rise.

However, there is a fundamental economic problem. Only this week Tom Kerridge, the restaurateur, said of his sector:

“Younger people, part-time staff, they just don’t exist very much in the businesses any more … those businesses cannot afford it”.


He cited national insurance contributions for those over 21 and the steep rise in the minimum wage for those aged 18 to 20, and pleaded for a VAT cut for the hospitality industry. Last Monday, the owner of a car repair business quoted in the Times said:

“Minimum wage for an apprentice now is ridiculous. It steers you away from wanting to have young people in your company”.


We must have some, doubtless uncomfortable, philosophical discussions about the minimum wage and about other employment rights, and about the health assessment process for benefit claimants, most of whom, as noble Lords heard on Monday, never have face-to-face consultations. We should discuss how to make as many “work-limiting” health conditions as possible unlimiting. I realise that this may require a review of GPs’ working practices, and I entirely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that we should perhaps be less uncritical about some of these diagnoses.

It is unfashionable to cite the Victorian distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor, but that too merits discussion. However Dickensian that distinction might sound—although Dickens himself, as close students of him will know, was not so opposed to it as many think—it ensured that scarce resources were channelled towards those in the most need and not used to encourage a life of unnecessary dependency.

It is 84 years since the Beveridge report, but since politicians of all colours like to cite it as the foundation stone of welfarism, we might note some of Beveridge’s doctrines. He said that

“getting work or getting well may involve a change of habits, doing something that is unfamiliar or leaving one’s friends or making a painful effort of some other kind. The danger of providing benefits, which are both adequate in amount and indefinite in duration, is that men, as creatures who adapt themselves to circumstances, may settle down to them”.

As relevant to this debate, he also said that

“six months for adults would perhaps be a reasonable average period of benefit without conditions. But for young persons who have not yet the habit of continuous work the period should be shorter; for boys and girls there should ideally be no unconditional benefit at all; their enforced abstention from work should be made an occasion of further training”.

He stressed that welfare

“should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility”

and emphasised that

“benefit in return for contributions, rather than free allowances from the State, is what the people of Britain desire”.

I suspect that our people desire that still, and would endorse another of Beveridge’s fundamentals, that

“the Idleness which destroys wealth and corrupts men, whether they are well fed or not”

is bad

“when they are idle”.

This reminds us that the Prime Minister’s moral question remains shamefully unanswered.