Youth Unemployment

Helen Whately Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2026 Commons Chamber

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

The Government have lost control of welfare. The benefits bill is ballooning. Sickness benefits alone will cost us £109 billion by the end of the decade. Working-age benefits are costing £161 billion right now and rising. But instead of bringing forward welfare savings, Labour MPs have chosen to spend ever more on benefits. Just the other day, they backed an extra £3 billion spending on scrapping the two-child benefit cap. It is all paid for in the same way—by taxpayers, by hard-working people, and by the businesses that employ them.

First the Government tax jobs, and then they wonder why there are fewer of them. Let me tell them: if you tax it, you get less of it. Under Labour, unemployment has gone up month after month. Our youth unemployment now rivals that of Greece, at over 16%. That is one in six young people out of work, wanting employment but denied the chance—and a university degree will not save them, either. Some 700,000 graduates are out of work, and nearly 1 million young people are not in education, employment or training. So many young people have done everything asked of them. They have studied hard, done their exams and got their grades, but now they are getting rejection after rejection to their job applications.

The Government are letting down a whole generation, and the Secretary of State knows it. He said so himself this week on the radio. He talked about the “scarring effects” of youth unemployment: worse mental health, worse outcomes and even lower life expectancy. He is right, so why are his Government making things so much worse? Let us be clear about what this new policy is. It is not a jobs plan or a serious new deal for young people; it is a sticking-plaster, and an expensive one costing over £1 billion. These are state-subsidised jobs to replace the real ones that Labour has killed.

The Secretary of State has laid into our record on apprenticeships, but he knows perfectly well that the drop he refers to happened because we raised the standard of apprenticeships to make them a qualification that would actually count, and to make them a meaningful alternative to university, not just a way for businesses to get cheaper workers. I warn him not to just chase higher numbers in his reforms; quality matters. And why are the Government doing nothing about dead-end degrees and mounting student debt? Why not adopt the policy we have announced of cutting back on low-value degrees, and using the saving to increase apprenticeships? This Government’s answer is to just go back, cap in hand, to the taxpayer.

At the end of his statement, the Secretary of State talked about welfare reform, but why do we never hear the important word “savings”? I think we know why. The Government tried and failed to make welfare savings last summer. What has changed since then? The Prime Minister is only weaker and more indecisive, though the problem becomes ever more urgent. Today’s personal independence payment figures show that claims are up again. There are over 300,000 more people on PIP since Labour took over—a rise of 9%—and the number of young people claiming PIP has risen by 14%. There are nearly 150,000 more people claiming benefits for mental ill health and neurodiversity. I have been clear: this cannot go on. Benefits are not the right answer. Work is better for us. People who can work should work.

The Secretary of State needs to answer some questions. Where exactly has the extra £1 billion that he has just announced for state-funded jobs come from? Will this latest plan actually bring down youth unemployment? Will it even touch the sides? How will he stop fraudulent claims for the cash? How will he make sure that no one loses their job because of his cash handouts? How will he make sure that all this spending makes a difference, and that he is not subsidising employment that would have happened anyway? Does he accept that taxing jobs on the one hand and subsidising them on the other is not an economic strategy, but the economics of the madhouse? Finally, can the Secretary of State at least agree that the benefits bill needs to come down? Perhaps he could take this chance to use the word “savings”. Does he see the irony? Does he understand my feeling of déjà vu? This is another plan from his party for welfare reform that spends more money, rather than saving it. When will he bring forward a plan to actually bring down the benefits bill? He talks about welfare reform; is this it?

[Pat McFadden]

I fear that the hon. Lady’s response was written without her listening to a word in the statement. She has confirmed that the Conservative party not only bequeathed us the problem, but has learned nothing about how to tackle it. There was no statement of responsibility, no statement of regret and no apology for the record on youth apprenticeships—in fact, she defended cutting youth apprenticeship starts. It is a continued pretence that somehow all of this started just two years ago.

The hon. Lady asks where the funding to help young people comes from. It comes from stable management of the economy—something that the Conservatives know nothing about and that we have practised for the past two years. Young people, at whom all of this is aimed, will have heard her disparage efforts to get them into work and to give them more opportunity. They will have heard her dismiss our changes, which will boost youth apprenticeships. They will have heard her pretend that we can somehow wish all this away with tax changes. That proves that the Conservatives have learned nothing from their disastrous management of the economy. They will have heard her say that the package does not offer young people anything, when we have announced a plan to give them a new deal with more jobs and more apprenticeships. That is the difference between our approach and theirs.

I want to give young people in this country opportunities to get skills, to get a job, to get off benefits and to build a better life for themselves. That is much better than kicking the ladder away and leaving the system unchanged, which is what the Conservatives did. How does the hon. Lady explain the number of NEETs rising by a quarter of a million in the last three years in which they were in power? How does she explain their lack of action to deal with it? When it comes to welfare, what I have said today is very clear and simple: the best means of welfare reform is to put work and opportunity at the heart of the system, and that is what we are doing with this plan.