Welfare

Simon Hoare Excerpts

Wednesday 11th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I have told the hon. Lady about the announcement that the British Retail Consortium has made. Hospitality employers also want young people to have opportunities in their businesses, and I think we will be hearing more about that before too long.

We have youth hubs being set up in every community to offer wraparound health, housing and employment support. I visited mine in Newham last week, hosted by West Ham United Community Foundation at the Foundry in Beckton. It was full of activity and optimism for the young people who were there. For long-term unemployed young people, there is a guaranteed job fully subsidised by the Government for six months, which from next April we will fast-track for young disabled people after just three months.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. Can I just say to him very politely—he knows the House respects the work he has done on this issue and his understanding of the broad picture—that none of those interventions would be required were it not as a direct result of Treasury policy? Change Treasury policy and employers will employ people of all abilities and all ages across the country. He is destroying job creation and then expecting plaudits for providing additional taxpayer money to subsidise people to create jobs that his Government are destroying.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his politeness, but the NEETs figure rocketed in the last three years of the Tory Government and that was not caused by a national insurance change. We are increasing the employment rate, making progress and tackling the terrible problems left behind by the previous Government. I will give way one final time and then I really must make progress.

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[Matthew Patrick (Wirral West) (Lab)]

I am a progressive. I believe in a social safety net to help people in their moment of need. That might be to manage a health condition or to deal with a moment of crisis, or it could be to support people through the natural ebbs and flows of employment, which I think we will see more of with the advent of AI. There is a challenge, however, in getting that support to work for people. It requires a safety net, which needs to be the right size. It needs to be wide enough to catch people when they fall, but not so wide that people cannot escape it. The modern safety net should not simply break someone’s fall; it should support them to get back into work.

The benefits of work are many, and those benefits can bring so much to an individual: self-esteem, money, mental health, physical health, resilience, routine, friendship, socialising and demonstrating to yourself and others that you can make a difference. I believe that the benefits are endless, which is why it is so heartbreaking when we see just how many young people do not have them.

One million young people are not benefiting from a job or not expanding their opportunities through education or training. Why? The Conservatives created the broken system that led to the outcomes we see today. They do not like to hear it, but it is true. Their system pushed people further away from the job market. They scrapped the Work and Health Programme, shut down Work Choice and left Access to Work in chaos. They made support so difficult that people were pushed towards the health component of universal credit to simply deal with the cost of living crisis.

What was the consequence of that? There was no requirement for those people to look for work, apply for jobs or do any work-related activity. The Conservatives’ system both cost more and pushed people further away from work. Their system told people that they cannot. We need a system that helps people see that they can. Members will forgive me if I do not look to the Tory party for a route to achieving that.

[Simon Hoare]

Does the hon. Member not kick himself that, in the 14 years that Labour sat quietly on the Opposition Benches, with think-tanks and everything else, it did zero planning for welfare reform? We are two-and-a-bit years into this Government. We await the Timms review; we await the Milburn review. Labour should have had a plan ready to go from day one, should it not? That is a missed opportunity, is it not?

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[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

From 2010 to 2024, every reform was opposed and every initiative was rebuffed by people who sat on the Opposition Benches. Labour Members remind me of St Augustine, because they try to tell us that they are now serious about welfare reform. Their prayer is “Make me a welfare reformer, but not yet”, because when they had the opportunity to introduce some reform, they rebelled. Keir Starmer blinked, the rebels got their way, and the reform agenda was kiboshed. The Prime Minister lost his authority, and the rest, as they say, is history. Do not take my word for it; the current Secretary of State for Work and Pensions told the whole world. He said that “Every meeting I have” with Labour MPs—not some, not the majority, but every meeting—

“is ‘Who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?’”.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

Going back to the speech made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel), when she was the Minister of State for Employment, I was her Parliamentary Private Secretary. We would sit through many a Westminster Hall debate secured by the Opposition, who are now the Government, complaining that we just were not spending enough. They said about every reform we brought forward, “Not good enough. You need to spend more.” There was never any attempt to reduce the welfare bill.

[Simon Hoare]

My right hon. Friend is right. As I said in an intervention on the hon. Member for Wirral West (Matthew Patrick), the Government had 14 years to plan for this great reform and modernisation of welfare, and they did nothing with it. They arrive in government, and precious little happens.

[Sean Woodcock]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Simon Hoare]

It gives me another minute, so why not?

[Sean Woodcock]

Is the hon. Gentleman’s position seriously that it is Labour’s fault that the welfare bill went up under the Conservatives?

[Simon Hoare]

No, that would be an asinine interpretation of what I have just said. The point I am making is that every time the Conservative party came up with a reform or a modernisation when in government, the gut reaction of the Labour party was to oppose it.

I happen to think that the welfare state is one of our crowning glories. It was brought in to address a number of deeply systemic societal problems, and it has been a tremendous force for good and transformation in our country. However, it is always intended to be a safety net, a permanent safety net for those who—as a result of disability, for example—find themselves unable to enter the workplace. It removes pressure and anxiety, and it gives people the dignity to live that they quite legitimately deserve, but it should never have been allowed under successive Administrations to become a cocoon. It has ceased to be a safety net; it has become a trap with perverse, Kafkaesque incentives, where the cumulative benefits an individual can receive are greater than anything they could hope to aspire to when getting into a job for the first time. I hope the House can agree that there is nothing kind or caring about trapping people in that sort of environment.

We all know—as various right hon. and hon. Members have mentioned in their speech—the fundamental importance and transformative nature of work for individuals, their families and their communities. It promotes a sense of self-respect, self-reliance, and being able to do things for yourself.

[Dr Mullan]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Simon Hoare]

I will not. The benefits of work are clear and unquestionable, yet we are trapping people through perverse incentives; if they earn an extra pound here or there, they suddenly lose a great slew of benefits. Surely—I say this to Members on the Treasury Bench—we will have to be far more imaginative and far more bespoke in how we approach welfare. We should be using digital and the raft of opportunities it offers to provide a far more bespoke, personally tailored network of support to get people back into work, rather than trapping them.

I want to say one thing about disability, as I had the honour of chairing the all-party parliamentary group for multiple sclerosis in the last Parliament. We will get more disabled people back into work because they want to stay in work—for all the reasons I have set out—if they have the confidence that they can ask their employer for reasonable adjustments, and if their employer has the confidence to ask what the employee might need in order to stay in work. Let us not have a slanging match across the two Dispatch Boxes; let us try to work cross-party. It will be good for the economy and good for our people up and down the land, and it will generate greater tax receipts to pay for the social services, defence and other areas that we want to see expenditure in. However, the status quo cannot be defended.