Getting Britain Working Again

Sam Rushworth Excerpts

Thursday 14th May 2026 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately]

I hate to tell the hon. Gentleman, but Labour is in charge now. It has had nearly two years and nothing is changing.

You do not have to take my word for it, Madam Deputy Speaker; here are the numbers. Over 8 million people are claiming universal credit, almost 4 million people are claiming sickness benefits and over 600,000 households are getting over £32,000 a year in benefits. That is more than the take-home pay of the average British worker. Ninety-one thousand households are getting over £50,000, which is enough to put them in the top 10% of our nation’s earners, and 16,000 are getting over £60,000 in benefits every single year. A person who works would have to earn over £70,000 to have that. All that is costing the country £140 billion a year. People know when they are being taken for a ride.

Yesterday, the Prime Minister had a chance—one last chance—to hit reset, reverse those trends, get people off benefits and bring down the welfare bill. But with his back against the wall, it is no surprise that the Prime Minister’s King’s Speech contained none of that. While hundreds of thousands of people struggle to find work, the Prime Minister is only interested in protecting one job: his own. Yes, the Secretary of State can claim that he is doing something—his work experience programmes, his youth schemes, the savings-free Timms review and all that—but we all know that that is just tinkering at the edges.

The Government tried welfare reform last summer and failed. Now, they have given up altogether. They had no plan when they got into office and they still have no plan now, and that matters. For every day of inaction, hard-working taxpayers pay the price. Doing nothing costs money. The welfare bill will reach £170 billion by the end of the decade and that money could be so much better spent on things such as defence or making our streets safer or—think of this—it could be left in people’s pockets for them to spend.

[Sam Rushworth (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

rose—

[Helen Whately]

The hon. Gentleman wants me to give way. Does he have a welfare savings plan? If so, let us hear it.

[Sam Rushworth]

I certainly do. It is this Labour Government and it is getting people off NHS waiting lists and back into work. However, it is not for me to answer the questions; my intervention was simply to give the hon. Lady another opportunity to answer the question that was put to her by my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Peter Swallow) and which she did not really answer. This broken system that she described as “Benefits Street” is a system that the Conservatives created. Why, in 14 years, did they do nothing about it? It is easy to create political anger, rather than to have dealt with it, and that is why this Government are now dealing with the Conservatives’ mess?

[Helen Whately]

Oh dear; what a shame. There were no ideas for savings there at all. If the hon. Gentleman thinks that will get him a job under the next Labour leader, I am afraid that he will have to keep trying.

Labour claims to be the party of working people, but the facts do not back that up. Labour always leaves office with unemployment higher than when it arrives, and it is on track to do that again. There are now over 300,000 more people unemployed than when this Government came to power. Their policies—the jobs tax, the Employment Rights Act—have actively killed jobs. Now, as mentioned in yesterday’s King’s Speech, we have the regulating for growth Bill. You couldn’t make it up.

Employers are being asked to swim against the tide with bricks in their pockets, and now the Government are planning to make it worse. Many businesses have stopped hiring; others are letting people go. Businesses tell me that they are getting hundreds of applications for jobs that they might have struggled to fill a couple of years ago. No wonder that there are 700,000 graduates on out-of-work benefits. Youth unemployment is at over 14%. This is a disaster.

Young people want to get their lives going, earn money, pay their own way, save for a car; instead, hundreds of thousands are stuck. The Secretary of State knows that. That is why he has frantically announced a flurry of schemes at the cost of £2.5 billion. Obviously, a work placement is better than nothing, but the young people I speak to want jobs, not Government-funded work experience.

Less than two years ago, the country voted us out and Labour Members in. They have laughed and jeered at us, but they are not laughing now because they have found out that governing is hard. They promised voters change, but the only change that most people have seen is that they are poorer. Who knows what they got up to in opposition? Clearly, it was not working out what they would do if they won the election. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury is chuntering. I know that yesterday he called the Leader of the Opposition “rude” when, actually, she was just telling the truth. He does not like to hear the truth. Maybe he should do a little less talking from the Front Bench and a little more listening.

Being in power is not an end in itself; what matters is what someone does with the power that voters trust them with. I am sure that many of those on the Government Benches care about our country, but caring is not enough. The question is: what are they going to do to fix it? If the King’s Speech that we are debating today tells us anything, it is that they do not know. The only things they can think of will make the situation worse; and on welfare, they have given up.

I believe in learning lessons whenever one can. One lesson that Labour Members should learn is to make good use of time in opposition; work hard, think hard and make a plan. That is what we have been doing, and that is why we have been able to set out an alternative King’s Speech, which has more in it than the actual King’s Speech. Take our plans for welfare—and to be clear, these are just our plans so far. We have a plan to reform welfare and make £23 billion in savings. We will bring back the two-child benefit cap, stop handouts to foreign nationals, stop sickness benefits for anxiety and ADHD, bring back face-to-face assessments, ban “sickfluencers”, reform fit notes and restore the household benefit cap to its original purpose of ensuring work always pays better than benefits. No more gaming the system, no more free cars for tennis elbow or acne—Britain will no longer be a cash machine for the world.

People have had enough. They can see our welfare system is not working. It is not even working for people who are seriously ill or disabled. We are not keeping our plan secret; it is all out there. Other parties are adopting our policies. Reform, for instance, has not been shy about doing so, although it has been confused, and its Members are not here today. The Secretary of State should feel free to do so too, and though the MPs behind him will hate it, we are here to help.

This is the most surreal King’s Speech debate I have ever taken part in. People out there are angry, frustrated and fed up. They can see the country is not working. They want the Government to fix it, but Labour are too busy working out who should be in charge. The saddest thing is that it will not make a difference. They can change their team captain, but they are still the same team. I have heard them cheer on taxes for farmers, family businesses and schools. I have heard them cheer for lifting the two-child cap. I have heard them argue against welfare savings. They think you fix poverty by giving out free breakfasts, paid for by people who are struggling to pay the bills themselves. Labour’s answer is always the same: tax more and spend more of other people’s money, and it is the wrong answer.

Sometimes in life you have to pick a side. We have picked one: we are on the side of people who get up each day and go to work. They are doing the right thing, and we back them. Sometimes things go wrong and people need help. That is why welfare should be a safety net, not a lifestyle choice. Labour have made their choice: it is to carry on as if nothing is wrong. Yesterday’s King’s Speech was a chance to fix things, and they blew it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Voaden]

What I said is absolutely correct. In my constituency of South Devon, new build homes in developer-led housing estates are selling for £950,000. We are not providing the homes we need—the social homes and the truly affordable homes that young people, young couples, young families and people who want to move out from their parents’ home need. We are providing the wrong sort of homes. Having a system led by housing developers that are driven by profit will never provide the homes that we need.

Is it any wonder that voters across the country have turned to the extreme ends of our political spectrum to stick two fingers up at what they see as an ineffective political class that has completely ignored them? “Blame the immigrants” or “blame the billionaires” seem to be the two easy answers thrown out by these parties to the difficult, thorny, complicated questions that this country faces. The sad truth is that neither of those two propositions will be enough to make the changes we need to see to reform the structures of our economy and public services and to improve the lives of those who need it most.

Ten years ago, we saw a referendum that cut our country in two, like a chainsaw through the trunk of a mighty oak tree, and that division has not healed. The arguments still rage, the communities still feel left behind, and the false promise offered in that awful referendum has turned out to be nothing but smoke and mirrors. People are still angry on both sides of that debate. The House will not be surprised to hear that as a Liberal Democrat, I welcome the Government’s promise to strengthen ties with our nearest neighbours in Europe. The House will probably not be surprised to hear me also say that that promise does not go far enough, especially if we are to get Britain working again.

The upcoming EU reset Bill is just the latest example of the Government’s lack of ambition when it comes to rebuilding our trading links with Europe. When we talk of Brexit red tape, nowhere is that more limiting than in the red lines that Labour tied around itself in its 2024 manifesto. It said on coming into office that the previous Conservative Government had left a £22 billion black hole in the UK’s public finances, yet the botched Brexit deal has left a £90 billion hole, similar in scale to the damage wreaked by the 2008 financial crash.

Businesses in South Devon regularly talk to me about the nightmare of trying to do business with Europe. Many have just given up on it altogether. Others are hanging on, desperately hoping that trading restrictions will be eased and customers will come back. I welcome the promise of a sanitary and phytosanitary deal, which cannot come fast enough for my food and farming businesses. We want to hear the Government talk about a customs union with the EU to slash the red tape that is holding us back, because economic growth has stagnated in this country for far too long. We also want to see the UK at the heart of European defence co-operation, not only for the benefits it would bring to national security, but for the investment opportunities it would provide for the supply chain. We must be front and centre of those negotiations. Europe would welcome our involvement, and we must be confident about shaping and leading that discussion.

There is so much to cover in the King’s Speech, but I will just touch on a couple of other areas. I have talked about people feeling ignored and forgotten. Nowhere is the visible representation of that starker than in our high streets, with boarded-up shops, endless vape shops, cafés and pubs struggling to survive, and exorbitant rents making it impossible to get a new business off the ground. The Government have pledged to nationalise British Steel to protect fewer than 3,000 jobs. I have no doubt that the wider economy in and around Scunthorpe will truly benefit from that decision, but why is there nothing in this speech to protect our once vibrant and precious hospitality industry, which has lost nearly 100,000 jobs in the past year? Those jobs are less visible than the closure of a steelworks or a car plant, because it is 10 jobs here and 20 jobs there, but the effect of the national insurance rise has been devastating up and down the country. Businesses have been calling last orders once and for all or simply shrinking their offer.

In my constituency, Rockfish, the California Inn, the Maltsters Arms and the Berry Head hotel—I could go on and on, because hospitality is the backbone of our economy—are cutting staff hours, choosing not to employ extra staff or closing two days a week so that they can manage on one exhausted chef, rather than employing a second, with the owner of the pub having to step into the kitchen when the chef has a few precious days off. This death by a thousand cuts is having a devastating impact on youth employment and part-time jobs. Those are the jobs that so many people rely on to combine with parenting, caring or studying. Let us not forget that every teenager who gets a job washing pots or waiting tables is learning valuable skills that will take them forward in the job market for years to come.

As the Secretary of State said earlier today, this is about the story of their lives, and I was pleased to hear his passion for supporting young people into work, but youth unemployment now stands at around 20%. That is utterly shameful. One in five of our young people is unable to even get a start in the workforce. The new small business protections Bill is laudable, but it falls far short of a proper plan to protect small businesses. We are disappointed that the Government have not listened to our plan to scrap the national insurance rise, reform business rates and prioritise a high street revival.

As a south-west MP, there is a list of Bills that I would have loved to see in the King’s Speech but are sadly missing. Yet again, the rural south-west seems to have been ignored. We have £45 billion for Northern Powerhouse Rail, but not a word about boosting vital bus services across the villages of the south-west. If we are to get people working again, we have to get them to work. If there are no buses, they cannot get there. There was nothing on boosting digital connectivity for hard-to-reach areas.

[Sam Rushworth]

I hear what the hon. Lady is saying—we have exactly the same challenges in my rural community, where people cannot get to job interviews or to jobs—but we passed the Bus Services Act 2025 in the last Session.

[Caroline Voaden]

I thank the hon. Member for his intervention. We do not have a mayor in Devon, so we miss out on a lot of that legislation’s benefits. I have loads of villages that do not even have a bus, so talk of bus fares is completely irrelevant when there is literally no service. How are young people supposed to get to college or work or seek opportunities if they cannot get out of their village?

There was no legislation to require banks to offer a minimum service guarantee to their customers. Lloyds bank made nearly £7 billion in profit in 2025, yet it closed branches with impunity, and the Government’s promises to address the lack of banking services have led to nothing so far.

There are some things in the King’s Speech that I would like to welcome. I am pleased to see the Government pledge finally to break the link between gas and electricity prices, which is vital in a country that depends more heavily on gas than many of our neighbours. Investment in home-grown renewable power is also welcome, but we want to see the focus of solar on warehouses and car parks, not on prime farmland. We also want to see stronger community benefits from new renewable infrastructure, empowering communities with the right to buy and sell community energy locally.

Talk of farmland leads me to a devastating omission from the King’s Speech: not once was the word “nature” mentioned. As my hon. Friend the Member for South Cotswolds (Dr Savage) so beautifully laid out in her speech last night, that was probably something that the King himself was disappointed to see. Where is the desire to protect our green spaces, to prompt a revival in nature, to restore our ancient forests and our peatlands, and to clean up our dirty rivers and waterways once and for all? We live in one of the most nature depleted countries in the world, yet nature is not a priority for the Government, despite all the benefits that it brings to people’s health and wellbeing. If we truly want to cut the NHS bill, that would be a really good place to start.

The new water Bill is welcome. The Liberal Democrats have long called for Ofwat to be replaced by a regulator that actually has some teeth, but until the Government address the elephant in the room and look at the ownership of the water industry, nothing will really change. No one should be making a profit from water: something that is so vital not only to us as humans, but to the health of all our planet’s ecosystems. The Liberal Democrats have long led the campaign in Parliament against the sewage scandal, tabling 44 amendments to the Water (Special Measures) Bill, none of which the Government or the Conservatives accepted. They must do more.

Lastly, I will mention the education for all Bill. We all know that support for children with special educational needs is broken, so I welcome the Government’s commitment to tackling it; we urgently need this reform. As my party’s schools spokesperson, I will scrutinise every line of the legislation when it comes before the House, so I will no doubt have time to say far more about it, but let me say this. We must build a system designed around the potential that every child has and that works to their strengths, noticing their gifts and talents and what they can achieve given the right support. We must stop judging them by their limitations, ostracising them, separating them from their peers and causing lifelong damage to their mental health and confidence.

Reform to SEND must be done with children and parents at its heart, with open, honest consultation with families, and with a serious commitment to invest the money needed in our educators and our schools so that they can rise to the challenge and truly build a more inclusive system that works for every child, from those facing the hardest of challenges to the lucky and blessed high achievers among them.

It is a strange thing to deliver this speech opposite Government Benches that are so clearly riven by intrigue, and not knowing who will be leading this legislation through Parliament. It is my hope that whatever path our Government colleagues decide to go down today—or over the next few days and weeks—they will commit to going further in the areas that I have set out, remember the challenges and higher costs faced by rural areas in service delivery and communications, and prioritise nature in every single major decision they make about infrastructure and new building programmes. Think bigger, think bolder, think greener for the benefit of everyone.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[Mark Sewards (Leeds South West and Morley) (Lab)]

I rise as a former teacher and someone who loves my current job more than that one—although I did love teaching. Does my hon. Friend agree with the Education Committee that FE colleges that are currently not exempt from claiming back VAT are at a disadvantage compared with sixth-form colleges attached to schools that can claim it back, and that there is an argument that FE colleges should also get that advantage?

[Sam Rushworth]

I fully agree with my hon. Friend. It would be remiss of me if I did not mention my absolute delight at the education for all Bill included in the King’s Speech. I intend to speak in the debate on that Bill when the time comes. I also thank the Minister for School Standards and the Secretary of State for what I thought was a model of how to engage with charities and parents, as well as with Back-Bench MPs, on that difficult but important piece of legislation. I think everybody across the House will welcome that Bill as they see the battleground over education, health and care plans coming to an end, and the proper resources that children need to thrive entering those schools.

I will finish where I started, by saying that it is not a question of whether we can afford to create opportunity; the fact is that we cannot afford not to do so. The future of our country depends on it.