Government Record on Education, Employment and Welfare

Motion to Take Note

Moved by

To move that this House takes note of the Government’s record on education, employment and welfare since July 2024.

My Lords, I am delighted to open this important debate on the Government’s record on education, employment and welfare, as we reach the end of the Starmer premiership and move to the Burnham one.

Over the past two years, an unfortunate pattern has emerged across the Government’s policies on these issues. Whether intended or not, their interventions have too often served to restrict opportunity rather than broaden it. Opportunity is the foundation of a free, prosperous society and economy. It is what allows a child from any background to succeed in education, a young person to secure their first job and an individual to build an independent life through work. Yet across education, employment and welfare, the Government have appeared increasingly determined to substitute individual aspiration and institutional freedom with central direction and state intervention. The result is not only a larger state—we just have to look at the eye-watering levels of government spending—but a society in which the pathways to fulfilling an individual’s potential are increasingly constrained and, in too many cases, cut off entirely. At a time when Britain faces economic and technological change, that is the wrong direction in which to travel.

I begin with education. The central question for any education system should be simple: are we giving the next generation the greatest possible opportunity to succeed? For much of the past two decades, the academies programme has helped answer that question positively. By giving schools greater freedom over recruitment, curriculum delivery, governance and innovation, academies have been an important driver of the significant improvements in standards and outcomes that have been achieved. Between 2009 and 2022, England rose from 21st to 11th in the PISA league tables for maths, from 25th to 13th for reading, and from 11th to 9th for science. Yet rather than building on this success, the Government in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act chose to curtail many of the freedoms that helped enable this progress. The reforms introduced by the Government to academies have represented a shift away from institutional autonomy and back towards central control. Schools now have less freedom to innovate, less flexibility to respond to local circumstances and fewer opportunities to develop distinctive approaches to excellence.

My Lords, my text for this simplistic opposition attack on the Government is simple: I will point out the legacy of the noble Baroness who has just spoken. She was in the Cabinet for six years. On 20 January 2025, the Economic Affairs Committee of your Lordships’ House produced a 42-paragraph letter to the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. This followed a short inquiry to understand what was driving the massive change to incentivise benefits and inactivity under the Tories. Time permits me to mention just two paragraphs.

Paragraph 1 read:

“Spending on incapacity and disability benefits has risen by more than 40 per cent in real terms since 2013 … This is around 20 per cent higher than the UK defence budget and equal to 22 per cent of the total health budget. Spending on incapacity and disability benefits is forecast to rise to £100.7 billion … pushing the total welfare bill above £370 billion. The latest figures show that around 3.7 million people of working age receive the health component of Universal Credit … 1.2 million more than in February 2020. As the Office for Budget Responsibility note, since before the COVID pandemic this rise has been uniform across age groups. This is in the context of there being 1.51 million people registered as unemployed”.

In Paragraph 7 of the letter, the committee said:

“While it is difficult to unravel the data to provide a clear picture of the level of economic inactivity, administrative data show that spending on health-related benefits has risen. This has occurred in all parts of the country and in all age groups. As the OBR notes, ‘The proportion of the working-age population in receipt of an incapacity benefit reached a post-financial crisis high of 7.0 per cent in 2023-24 and is forecast to reach an all-time high of 7.9 per cent in 2028-29. This reverses the steady decline in caseload prevalence from the early 2000s to mid-2010s’”,

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, for securing this important debate. I looked at the list of speakers and thought this was going to be a fantastic debate about our children’s future. I do not want it to be about how bad one side or the other was, because that will not help any young person. I have always been passionate about young people—I will return to that—and I will always fight for them. I did it before I arrived in your Lordships’ House and I do it now. Earlier this month I spoke about helping young people gain work experience in your Lordships’ House by coming in to assist us. This week, a fantastic A-level student from north London, Oliwia Pietrusa, helped me draft my speech and did some of the research for it.

A lot of speakers will follow me, so I will restrict my speech to two bits: NEETs—young people not in employment, education or training—and primary schools. As we have seen from the recent Milburn review, young people are being devastated by the side-effects of a lack of government intervention. Research by the House of Lords Library showed recently that 1.012 million young people aged 16 to 24 are not in employment, education or training. As the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, reminded us, Alan Milburn warned of a rising “lost generation”. The real issue now is about the system. Is it obsessed by ticking boxes? Are we just pushing our young people to chase qualifications but not finding destinations for them, by which I mean long-term, secure jobs? We are missing a proper participation system that guides our teenagers from the classroom into a career.

We also need to support schools that are struggling, which brings me on to the issue of the Government’s target of recruiting 6,500 new teachers. In my opinion, that completely ignores the challenges of primary schools. There has been a massive drop in primary school trainees. I am worried that falling rolls in primary schools are putting pressure on teacher recruitment and that the drop in primary school pupils will make its way through to secondary schools. There is a challenge there. We can see that happening here in London in particular, where places such as Lambeth and Hackney are now seeing pressures in schools. In open evidence to the Public Services Committee, we heard from one head teacher who said his school was closing.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Evans of Bowes Park, for bringing this debate today, and it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley.

I want to focus my comments on opportunity and social mobility. In assessing the Government’s record on education, employment and welfare since July 2024, we cannot ignore the growing loss of humanities provision across higher education. Universities are autonomous institutions, but their decisions are shaped by the wider financial and policy environment.

A successful education system is measured not simply by qualifications or apprenticeships but by the breadth of opportunity it offers. The Social Mobility Commission’s State of the Nation 2024 reminds us that opportunity remains profoundly shaped by geography. When courses disappear from universities across whole regions, it is often students without the financial means to relocate who lose more opportunities first. Those from more affluent backgrounds can frequently move elsewhere or absorb the additional costs of studying further from home; those from less advantaged backgrounds often cannot. As a result, talent is constrained not by ability but by circumstance.

Social mobility depends not only on opening doors but on ensuring that those doors exist in every part of the country. If whole disciplines become concentrated in a handful of institutions or regions, educational choice increasingly becomes a privilege rather than a right. That risks reinforcing existing inequalities and undermining the Government’s stated ambition to widen opportunity and spread growth beyond our major cities.

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Evans on her excellent introduction to this important debate, and it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle.

I will concentrate on NEETs: that is, young people who leave school without entering sixth form or FE, employment or training. They are at the centre of Alan Milburn’s interim report on Young People and Work, which reveals very bleak prospects for NEETs. There are nearly a million of these young people—that is, one in eight of our school leavers—and the numbers are rising. Nearly 60% of them are economically inactive, which means they are detached from the labour market and not looking for work. The Milburn report describes this as a “moral crisis” with “economic consequences”. The economic consequences are that the annual cost to the taxpayer for the present numbers is £125 billion. All other EU countries, apart from Romania, are doing better than us on this issue, and, alarmingly, over the past decade, the number of NEETs citing health problems has risen by 70%, four out of 10 citing mental health problems.

I accept that the position has developed under successive Governments. We now have the aftermath of Covid, war, and a volatile world. We need economic growth. I can do no better than quote the noble Lord, Lord Walker of Broxton—I think he is not in his place today—who said in the welfare debate on 11 June that

“we will cure the problem”

of NEETs

“only by growing the economy … the Government need to be more business friendly. It is only business that creates wealth and jobs and pays tax”.—[Official Report, 11/6/26; col. 1443.]

He is of course right. Employers are key players for NEETs. They provide entry and part-time jobs in retail, hospitality and hairdressing. How many people here started off in that way? I certainly did. They also support apprenticeships. However, those functions, for which we depend on business, have been made well-nigh impossible for many employers by the Government’s imposition on them of higher national insurance costs—which have already been mentioned—increases in the national minimum wage, higher business rates and heavier regulation.

My Lords, the level of youth unemployment in England today is 16.2%. So many youngsters are leaving school at 18 without any employability skills, and that is a disgrace for the fifth-richest country in the world. It is also an indictment of the failure of the education policy of Conservative and Labour Governments since the year 2000, because they have created 1 million people now between 16 and 24 who are unemployed, which is an absolutely shaming figure.

The colleges that I have been trying to stimulate over the last 15 years, university technical colleges, have an unemployment rate of lower than 3%: 20% of our students become apprentices, 50% go to universities to study STEM subjects, and the rest get jobs locally because they have worked with local employers for four years. That is what is needed.

We need a revolution in education. I think that it will be introduced by our new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, when he is appointed on Monday. He has made many speeches on the importance of technical, practical and vocational education. No Prime Minister since Thatcher, from John Major to Keir Starmer, has made any speech on technical and practical education and learning by hand. No Prime Minister has done it. Search as you will, you will not find them. I think that Andy Burnham will introduce significant changes. About two years ago, he made a statement in Manchester that he wanted to scrap the EBacc, which has an academic curriculum, and replace it with the MBacc. Since then, my charity and organisation of UTCs have been working with him to find a way through.

We have found one. The answer is to look at the curriculum of all secondary schools, particularly Church schools and bog-standard comprehensives, and make sure that you can insert into them good technical education. You can do so only by inserting a sleeve of education from 14 to 18. That is what Andy Burnham asked us to provide him with over the last two years. A school in Manchester will open next September with a sleeve and one will open this September in Barrow-in-Furness. That is the headquarters of BAE Systems, which cannot recruit students who are talented and committed from the schools in Cumbria. Some 120 students will join that school in September. Of those, 90 have already selected the technical sleeve and 30 have selected the academic sleeve. I think the Prime Minister will try to repeat that pattern substantially over the country. We should welcome this. That is the only way that we will get economic growth. It is the only way that we will be able to reduce youth unemployment significantly. We are going to face a revolution, which I very much welcome.

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, for introducing this debate. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who always has important and interesting things to say about vocational training—and, it seems, about ministerial appointments.

I am very proud that this Government’s mission is to reindustrialise Britain, make work pay and lift living standards. There has been real progress. The UK is now the fastest-growing economy in the G7. Better job security and higher wages through stronger employment rights incentivise workers and reduce turnover costs for business. NHS waiting lists are falling, delivering a healthier workforce. That benefits business too. The Resolution Foundation reports that this year the lowest-income half of families in Britain will see a significant improvement in their standard of living. Let us remember that the single greatest contribution to social mobility in this country has been this Government scrapping the two-child benefit limit, lifting half a million children out of poverty. That is the kind of schooling that I am interested in, because it will transform not only their lives but the lives of their families and communities.

To generate fair growth, we must tackle Britain’s record of low investment and poor productivity. Government action to accelerate clean energy production shows what can be achieved. The CBI reports that the net-zero sector now supports over 1 million jobs and over 23,000 firms whose productivity is 48% above the national average. We need to see that success across sectors, to fund decent welfare and education and to deliver the good, skilled jobs that the British people demand.

That brings me to a new report by University College London for the ETUC which was published last month. For two decades, the debate about economic competitiveness has been framed around the diagnosis that labour costs are too high, which in turn requires pay restraint and deregulation. This new report draws on a 25-year firm-level analysis of Europe’s 300 largest publicly listed corporations and provides evidence that that diagnosis is wrong. What is holding back growth is not the cost of labour but the misdirection of capital. Profits have been increasingly diverted away from productive investment into shareholder payouts, debt-funded distributions and financial reserves.

My Lords, I also most warmly congratulate my noble friend on a brilliant speech in which she said all that needed to be said. Many of us will repeat the same message, but that is what you do in church—as the right reverend Prelate will understand—and you learn the message in the end, so I hope that I will be forgiven for doing so.

Education, employment and welfare cannot be judged in isolation. Together they determine whether people can build secure and independent lives. Much of what the Government want to happen is commendable, but too much of what has actually happened is deplorable. Mission is not the point. I have always had a great regard for the noble Baroness who just spoke, but lifting the two-child limit is not the point. This Government are so good at doing easy things. They do not seem to have any stomach or courage to introduce unpopular measures, yet most of us know that to achieve success you have to do difficult things. I had to shut hospitals. The noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, had to shut mines. If you want progress, you have to do extremely tough things. This Government too often play to the gallery and are not prepared or do not have the courage to tackle what must happen.

I will say a bit about teachers and lecturers, who provide such a vital service. It again shows commitment that 4,000 of the promised 6,500 additional teachers have been delivered, but the real problem is retention. How can we make teaching a more worthwhile activity? I have just returned from the University of Hull, where I received an honorary degree, I am delighted to say. Mine was a long service award for 17 years as chancellor, and I was being given it alongside the most distinguished noble Lord, Lord Norton, who has done decades of proper service at the university. But the ceremony was a teacher graduation, and I was so impressed by the dedication, professionalism, commitment and, above all, the support the university can offer teachers in the region the moment they get burnout. When they get depressed, demoralised and have compassion fatigue, they can provide mentors, networks and further training. I commend that example.