The following Statement was made in the House of Commons on Tuesday 26 November.
“With permission, Madam Deputy Speaker, I shall make a Statement on our Get Britain Working White Paper, bringing forward the biggest reforms to employment support in a generation, turning a department for welfare into a department for work, and taking the first steps towards delivering our bold ambition of an 80% employment rate in a decade of national renewal.
Nothing short of fundamental reform is needed to turn the page on the last 14 years, the legacy of which has left the UK as the only G7 country whose employment rate has not returned to pre-pandemic levels and with a near-record 2.8 million people out of work due to long-term sickness, and almost 1 million young people not in education, employment or training and millions more stuck in low-paid insecure work. All those problems are far worse in the Midlands and the north, parts of the country that were deindustrialised in the 1980s and 1990s—the very same places that have lower life expectancy and chronic poor health that the Conservative Party repeatedly promised to level up but repeatedly failed to deliver on.
The result is an economic but, above all, social crisis, paid for in the life chances and living standards of people across this country, and by a benefits bill for sickness and disability that is set to rise by £26 billion by the end of this Parliament. We have ended up here because of the failure of Conservative Members to create good jobs in every part of the country, to deliver on the NHS and to properly reform welfare. Under our Government, that will change, with new opportunities matched by the responsibility to take them up: under this Labour Government, if you can work, you must work.
Our White Paper brings in three major reforms. First, we will create a new jobs and careers service that overhauls jobcentres: from a one-size-fits-all service that overwhelmingly focuses on administering benefits, to a genuine public employment service that provides personalised support for all. We will bring jobcentres together with the National Careers Service in England, beginning with a pathfinder early next year, backed with £55 million of initial funding. We will work closely with mayors and local leaders to ensure that our new jobs and careers service is rooted in local communities and properly joined up with local help and support. We will also work closely with employers to develop the service, because only one in six businesses has ever used a jobcentre to recruit, and that must change.
For too many people, walking into a jobcentre feels like going back in time to the 1980s or 1990s, so we will trial a radically improved digital offer using the latest technologies and AI to provide up-to-date information on jobs, skills and other support, and to free up work coach time. We will also test video and phone support—because in the 2020s, rather than go into the jobcentre only every week or fortnight, people can have a jobcentre in their pocket. Our front-line staff are our greatest asset, so we will develop the work coach and careers adviser professions, including by launching a new coaching academy.
The second major reform is our new youth guarantee, so that every young person is earning or learning. This comes alongside our commitment to provide mental health support in every school, our work experience and careers advice offer, and our plans to reform the last Government’s failed apprenticeship levy to give more young people the opportunities they deserve. Our new youth guarantee will go further, bringing together all the support for 18 to 21 year-olds under the leadership of mayors and local areas so all young people have access to education, training and employment opportunities and no young person misses out. Today I can announce that we will establish eight trailblazer areas for our youth guarantee: the Liverpool city region, the West Midlands, Tees Valley, east Midlands, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, west of England, and two areas within Greater London, backed by £45 million of additional funding.
I can also announce a new national partnership to provide exciting opportunities for young people in sports, arts and culture, starting with some of Britain’s most iconic cultural and sporting organisations, including the Premier League, the Royal Shakespeare Company and Channel 4, building on the brilliant work they already do to inspire and engage the younger generation and get them on the pathway to success.
This is our commitment to young people: ‘We value you, you are important, we will invest in you and give you the chances you deserve; but in return for these new opportunities, you have a responsibility to take them up, because being unemployed or lacking basic qualifications when you are young can harm your job prospects and wages for the rest of your life. And that is not good enough for young people or for our country’.
The third reform in our White Paper is our new plan to drive down economic inactivity caused by poor health. The Health Secretary is already taking action to get people back to health and back to work, with extra support to drive down waiting lists in the 20 NHS trusts with the highest levels of economic inactivity. We are joining up employment and health support, expanding individual placement support to reach an additional 140,000 people with mental health problems and delivering new WorkWell services, which include GPs referring patients to employment advisers and other work-related support such as the brilliant service in the Junction Medical Practice in north London we visited recently.
However, we will go much further and faster to tackle this issue. To meet the scale of the challenge, we will devolve new funding, new powers and new responsibilities to tackle economic inactivity to mayors and local areas, because local leaders know their communities best. We will support all areas in England to produce local ‘Get Britain Working’ plans, joining up work, health and skills support.
Today I am announcing eight trailblazer areas backed by £125 million of additional funding in South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, the north-east, Greater Manchester, Wales, York and North Yorkshire, and two Greater London areas. In three of these areas—South and West Yorkshire, and the north-east—this will include dedicated input and £45 million of funding for local NHS integrated care systems. We are also funding a new supported employment programme called Connect to Work, backed by £115 million of initial funding for next year. This will be included in the integrated settlements of combined authorities, starting with Greater Manchester and the West Midlands.
Employers have such an important role to play in helping get people into work, and crucially to stay in work, so today I can announce a new independent ‘Keep Britain Working’ review, looking at the role of UK employers and government in tackling health-related inactivity and creating healthy workplaces. This will be led by the former chair of John Lewis, Sir Charlie Mayfield, and will report in the autumn.
Finally, we will bring forward a Green Paper on our proposals for reforming the health and disability benefits system, so that disabled people and those with health conditions have the same rights as everybody else, including the right to work; so that we treat disabled people with dignity and respect; and so that we shift the focus to prevention and respond to the complex and fluctuating nature of today’s health conditions. We will work closely with disabled people and their organisations as we develop our proposals, which we will publish in the spring.
This White Paper starts to turn the corner on the past 14 years, putting forward the real reforms we need to get more people into work and on at work, to give young people the very best start in life and to ensure our employment and social security system understands the fundamental issue that a healthy nation and a healthy economy are two sides of the same coin. This is how we get Britain working again. It is how we get Britain growing again, and I commend this Statement to the House”.
My Lords, we on these Benches welcome this White Paper and are very keen that it should work and deliver positive outcomes for people who are out of the labour market, people who are economically inactive, those with health problems, and young people trying to get a productive start in life. Many of the proposals contained in the White Paper are either based on or continuations of some of the work we started in government—our WorkWell pilot schemes, our youth offer with youth hubs, and the universal support schemes—but we are not quite sure about the carrying on of the fit note, so I would be grateful for some confirmation on that. It is critical that the outcomes of the White Paper proposals work and, to that end, we really want them to.
I will talk about outcomes, which are important when looking at the investment being committed to this important area of work. As many in this House will know, I spent many years working with others in this sphere, so noble Lords must forgive my passion and commitment to the subject. Let me give just a few examples. On ThinkForward, we put our advisers in schools, working with the teachers and the management team. Our job was to prevent young people becoming NEET in the first place. The outcomes were that 85% of the 14 to 16 year-olds showed significant improvement in their attendance and behaviour. Some 60% of the group achieved at least five GCSEs at grade A to C and —wait for it—96% of the 17 to 18 year-olds in further education, employment or training were still there after a year.
Then we put our advisers into doctors’ surgeries. Let me tell your Lordships about the outcomes: a 20% reduction in GP appointments, a 74% reduction in referrals to practice counsellors—not that there is anything wrong with counsellors—and a 34% reduction in antidepressant prescriptions. Some 36% of people who completed the course were in employment and 80% of the 36% were still in employment 12 months later. This was for one surgery with a cohort of 200 people, at a cost of just over £2,000 a job. The noble Baroness who was the Minister of State for Education visited the project and saw for herself how great it was.
My Lords, on these Benches we welcome the encouragement the Government are giving to improving apprenticeships, reforming jobcentres and investing in the health service to cut mental health and other health problems affecting labour activity rates. The long-term sickness at the end of this Parliament, projected to be 2.8 million, is clearly completely unacceptable, and the social and benefit costs of that will be dire. We need to transform our training, career and employment services. The only problem is that we have been arguing and discussing this for more than 50 years of my political life. It comes up in every generation.
In this sort of debate or Statement, we should have in front of us all the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Moyo, from the Budget debate. She said that
“if Britain were ranked against each of the 50 US states in terms of wealth, it would be last, with Britain’s GDP per capita … below America’s poorest state, Mississippi”.—[Official Report, 11/11/24; col. 1614.]
Our per capital income in this country has not grown for 10 or possibly 15 years; 25 years ago our economy was larger than China’s, and we are now 20% of the size of China. Those are the warning signals, and therefore investment in training is absolutely fundamental to the Government’s growth strategy.
I have six points, which I hope will be helpful, on aspects that I am worried about. First, as I said, we have been struggling with our training, career services and jobcentres for more than 50 years. There have been so many initiatives. Does the Minister accept that it is not going to take one year, nor five years, nor possibly even 10 years? This is a 20-year programme to get this right. It needs investment and long-term planning to achieve comprehensive reform.
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My other point on outcomes is, as noble Lords have heard me say many times, that getting someone into a job is one thing but keeping them there is another. Will His Majesty’s Government publish a set of metrics against which we can judge the success of Get Britain Working? Will they publish quarterly performance data? This will allow us to see what is working—and, indeed, what needs to change—to make this policy more effective. There is nothing wrong with changing half way through or changing course; people who do not change their minds do not change anything. Once someone has a job, will they retain the support of their coach to help them stay in work to ensure that the return on the investment reaches its full potential?
On employers, economic activity is not a problem that the Government can solve on their own. Businesses are the engine of our economy. They create jobs. No Government can improve employment rates without creating an environment where business can thrive and grow. If people are to get off benefits and into work, there must be jobs for them to do. However, as a result of this Government’s Budget, businesses are saying that they will no longer be hiring. Some 50,000 jobs will be lost from this Budget alone, according to the OBR. Does the Minister agree that the Government’s decision to raise employer national insurance contributions has had a negative impact on the chances of finding employment? If the Minister wishes to help more 18 year- olds into work, I respectfully suggest—I was challenged on this many times here—that she might speak to the Chancellor who has made it so that from April it will cost £5,000 more for a business to employ someone.
The Minister might also take the opportunity to speak to the Business Secretary whose Employment Rights Bill will, according to the Government’s own impact assessment, make it less likely that employers will take on young people. Does the Minister agree that the Government’s policies are counterproductive and making it harder for people to get into work? Only employers create jobs—and they have a very challenging time ahead.
As much as the people we are trying to help need continued, robust support, so do employers. We will be asking them to try to integrate people with various issues into their workforce. Let me tell noble Lords about one project I was involved in. A very high-profile car company said it wanted to integrate long-term unemployed people into its workforce. We got a young girl booking the executive travel for the workforce. She turned up for work on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday but on Friday she was a no-show. Our staff went round and knocked on the door. She came down in her pyjamas. We said, “What are you up to?”. She said, “I never went to school on a Friday and nobody said anything”. That is true. We told her to get dressed and took her to work. The next week, the same thing happened. We went round, knocked on the door and took her to work. The third week, she showed up and it was not a problem. That is an example of the level of support that people need.
We on these Benches fully support the review of the apprenticeship levy. It is much needed and will be welcomed by employers. But I am disappointed that those on the Labour Benches in the other place could not recognise the significant work that came before them on apprenticeships. We have had over 5.8 million apprentices earning while they learn since 2010, 225,000 of them at degree level since degree apprenticeships were launched by the Conservative Government. Over that time, we developed 690 high-quality apprenticeship standards in partnership with 5,000 employers, 370 of those in STEM subjects, ensuring that we delivered the skills the country needs. This is a record to be proud of and I know the Minister will be keen to build on it.
I come now to the merging of jobcentres and the careers service. It is good to see the continued cross-government working between the DWP, the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care. It is really important that the Government work across departments. The merging of Jobcentre Plus and the National Careers Service is a significant move. Can the Minister tell the House what assessment and analysis has been made to result in this decision? What is the plan for the merged service to become operational and what do His Majesty’s Government forecast that the benefits will be? What is the plan for ensuring the staff have the skills to carry out their roles? What is the timetable to deliver the new service and when will it become operational?
The challenge to Get Britain Working should not be underestimated but do we really need to wait one to two years for it to gain momentum? I assure the whole House that we on these Benches want this to work; we want Britain to work. For the sake of the people, we all want to help. To quote my leader in the other place: we are here for you—let us help. I personally pledge any help I can give to making this work.
Secondly, are the Government worried that there is a huge shortage of resources here? There are a number of schemes in this White Paper devolving to mayors eight trailblazers; we are going to spend £45 million next year. That is just £6 million per region. It sounds like quite a lot of money but in reality it is not, so there is just a slight worry that this is a sticking plaster trying to deal with a long-term problem. Too many of these funding projects are just for one year, when we actually need a long-term plan. The White Paper seeks to bring together the jobcentres and the National Careers Service to transform our training arrangements. This is going to involve a major culture change. Any other organisation undergoing this would be planning for the long term and understand that it is going to take a major effort to achieve it, let alone make an impact. Do the Government realise this?
Thirdly, the youth guarantee is a fine objective, but in the White Paper there is very little mention of the role of further education. This is one sector, outside universities, that has been neglected and underresourced over the last few years, but it is fundamental to all this. Are the Government going to set some objectives and produce a reform of further education?
Obviously, the one priority that the Government have set—quite rightly—is that we must clear the backlog in mental health care and in the health services, but all the evidence is that early intervention is required to get people back into work quickly. Is there a conflict between the long-term need to clear the backlog and having resources to deal with the short-term, immediate need?
Finally, reducing the backlog in the NHS, which is behind a lot of these problems, is going to require real progress in social care. I know that the Government are struggling to come up with their reforms on this, but I repeat that releasing the NHS beds that are being used for social care is absolutely fundamental to providing beds to get people back into the labour market. They cannot get the care at the moment.