Getting Britain Working Again

Munira Wilson Excerpts

Thursday 14th May 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sam Rushworth (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests in that I am the chair of the all-party parliamentary group for T-levels. I thank Harrison Willmott, a sixth-form student and work experience student, who helped research some of the figures for my speech today. He is sitting in the Gallery. I also welcome today’s positive growth figures—the highest quarterly growth in the G7 and the highest real-terms growth in over four years, as well as falling unemployment.

However, there are moments in a nation when a challenge becomes so large and so deeply rooted that it ceases to be merely a policy problem and becomes a test of national purpose. I believe that is where Britain now stands on work, skills and opportunity, because across our country, but particularly in communities such as mine in Bishop Auckland, a generation of young people are growing up under pressures that no previous generation quite faced in the same combination. Those young people have lived through covid and a youth mental health crisis, and they face rising housing insecurity, economic anxiety and a labour market that is changing faster than institutions have adapted. One in seven 16 to 24-year-olds in Bishop Auckland are not in education, employment or training.

I recently visited Dene Valley and Shildon, a deprived part of my constituency that has the highest child poverty rate in County Durham. I met locals to listen to their views about regeneration, and senior citizens with long memories told me stories about a time when these villages were buzzing, with their own swimming baths and the best sprung dance floor in the area. It was a time when people could leave school, and go straight into apprenticeships in the mines, railways or brickworks. It was hard graft, but there was secure work and dignity. The closure of the pits, the wagon works and other industries left deep scars on our community and, in some cases, intergenerational poverty.

I know the effect on a community of seeing thousands of jobs disappear, which is why I welcome this Government’s commitment to British Steel in the King’s Speech. I thank the Government for the work done to save 700 jobs at Hitachi in nearby Newton Aycliffe, and I also thank my hon. Friend and parliamentary neighbour the Member for Newton Aycliffe and Spennymoor (Alan Strickland) for leading that campaign.

Britain’s NEET rate is significantly higher than in many comparable economies, and the consequences are not temporary. Research has shown that prolonged youth unemployment scars earnings, confidence and opportunities for decades. A young person disconnected from work at 19 can still feel the effects in middle age. This is not simply an economic failure; it is a moral failure. If we do not act now, we risk writing off the potential of an entire generation precisely at the moment that Britain needs their talents the most. When they were in government, the Conservatives hollowed out the very systems that help young people find their place, and they talked endlessly about opportunity while cutting away at the ladders that create it.

Ensuring good jobs for our people is a fundamental duty for everyone in this place, so I welcome the ambition set out in the King’s Speech that will help to sustain and create new industries in the north-east, strengthening Britain’s energy security, expanding infrastructure, supporting the defence industries, accelerating the building of social and affordable homes, and creating opportunities through growth.

When I look across the area that I am so privileged to represent, I see real opportunities: new industry around lithium in Weardale; geothermal energy and other types of renewable power to get us off the fossil fuels rollercoaster, creating energy that we build and keep, and creating local jobs; the potential for house building and regeneration in the Dene Valley area; defence jobs, with fantastic employers such as Cook Defence Systems in Stanhope, PGP and Teescraft already in the area, so we can become an eco-centre for the defence industry; new jobs in healthcare; and jobs for a generation of trained counsellors, educational psychologists, and speech and language therapists who will be in our schools thanks to this Government’s commitment to special educational needs.

The King’s Speech also contained plans to strengthen our relationship with Europe. That matters, because it is not all good news. We have lost jobs in my community in Barnard Castle. Pharmaceutical jobs moved to Austria, on the other side of the boundary.

We need to be honest: too many businesses I speak to tell me they struggle to find the skills they need in the workforce. We cannot deliver the defence manufacturing jobs without technicians, fabricators, engineers and advanced manufacturing apprenticeships. We cannot deliver clean power and energy resilience without electricians, retrofit specialists, geothermal engineers, heat network installers and construction workers. We cannot build the homes this country needs without skilled tradespeople. We cannot compete in a world transformed by AI and advanced technology if millions of young Britons are left without the skills or confidence to participate in the future economy. The great challenge of this decade is not whether good, honest work will exist; it is whether Britain will equip its people to do it. That requires us to rebuild the skills pipeline in Britain that has been neglected for too long. The answer is strengthening partnerships between FE colleges and local businesses.

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way. I agree with a lot of what he has said, but on FE colleges, I happened to visit Richmond upon Thames College in my constituency earlier this week, and the chief executive of the group told me that this year it has had only 0.55% per student uplift in funding, despite the White Paper published by the Government last year promising a real-terms increase year on year. That means it will not be able to create the places that young people need or to pay its lecturers enough. Does he agree that that is sorely disappointing from his Front Bench?

[Sam Rushworth]

I am coming on to talk about the importance of FE funding, while understanding the challenges the Government face. There is enormous demand to spend money everywhere, but I want to make the case for why we really need to resource FE.

FE colleges endured years of under-investment. Funding per student fell by 11% over 14 years of Conservative government. Vocational education was too often treated as second class, and apprenticeship opportunities declined precisely at the moment we needed them most. Between 2017 and 2024, apprenticeship starts for under-19s fell sharply, while too much of the apprenticeship levy drifted away from creating genuine opportunities for young people to enter the labour market. At the very moment that Britain needed a skills revolution, we got drift.

I spent some time as an FE college teacher during that period. It was a job that I loved. I think I loved it even more than this job because of the opportunity, teaching access to higher education courses, to work with school leavers who had struggled and with young adults who needed a second chance. I left because I was not really earning the minimum wage. That is how it is in our colleges.

I want to take a moment to pay tribute to the fantastic staff at Bishop Auckland College for the vital work they do as teachers, mentors and carers to people in their late teens and young adult years, and to the work they also do to tackle poverty. I regularly meet Principal Shaun Hope, because I regard Bishop Auckland college as a key partner in everything I would like to achieve in the place I represent. He recently told me that they have a closet of clothes that they give away, and that because of the poverty of the students going to the college, he has had to add extra budget to ensure that everyone can get a breakfast and lunch.

The decision to cut the education maintenance allowance and not replace it was one of the worst pieces of vandalism by the previous Government. That is why I welcome the lowering of the voting age in the Representation of the People Bill, giving young people a stake and the power to use their vote to demand better. I also welcome new protections from foreign interference, because I somehow doubt that a Thailand-based crypto billionaire had the interests of young people in Bishop Auckland at heart when he chose to give £5 million—and more—to Reform UK.

I welcome the measures and ambitions outlined in the King’s Speech. I welcome the emphasis on growth and opportunity, the focus on rebuilding Britain’s industrial capacity, and the Government’s commitment to reforming skills provision and strengthening pathways into work. For too long Britain has operated with an outdated hierarchy of success—one that implied that the only prestigious route was academic. That thinking has held our country back. There should be no hierarchy of esteem between academic and vocational education, and a young person training to become an engineer, a care worker, a builder, a digital technician or a heat-pump installer contributes every bit as much to Britain’s future as someone sitting in a university lecture hall.

Apprenticeships done properly remain one of the greatest engines of social mobility that the country has ever created. They provide not just qualifications but wages, confidence, structure, dignity and purpose. I welcome the move towards a more flexible growth and skills levy, new foundation apprenticeships, and the Government’s efforts to make it easier for small businesses to take on young apprentices again.

The Association of Colleges, however, has rightly warned that, while additional in-year growth funding is welcome, colleges remain under intense financial pressure after years of rising student numbers, inflationary costs and workforce shortages. Colleges are being asked to deliver more students with more technical pathways, more specialist provision and more support for vulnerable learners, often without the long-term funding that they need to plan sustainably. If we ask FE colleges to become the backbone of Britain’s growth strategy, we must give them the resources to deliver.

FE colleges are not merely peripheral institutions; they are core economic infrastructure. They train the people who will deliver the ambitions that we set out in the King’s Speech. In places such as Bishop Auckland, they are institutions of hope, aspiration and opportunity.