Helen Whately

I am grateful to you, Mr Speaker, for granting the urgent question. It is a shame that the Minister had to be dragged here. Last week, the Secretary of State was only too eager to talk about this report on the telly. Where is he today? Why so quiet now? I think we all know. The Secretary of State has been caught out telling the devastating truth about Labour MPs: “who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others”? That is what Labour MPs really think, and that is what the Government have done. They have put up people’s taxes, spent more on benefits and left hard-working people with less to live off. Once again, Labour’s shenanigans are getting in the way of something we really should be talking about. Every morning, a million young people wake up in Britain with nothing to do and nowhere to go. This is a disaster for our country, our economy and, worst of all, for all those young people: Labour’s lost generation. The Minister said that it started under us—yes, the numbers did start going up from the pandemic, so this was not a surprise for Ministers—yet here we are after almost two years of Labour in office and it still has no plan. All it has done is make the situation worse, and of course commission this big report. I welcome Alan Milburn’s contribution—it is a serious analysis—but Milburn himself says it is just a diagnosis; there are no solutions, actual answers or policies. In fact, he even tells us that the things the Government have been doing—their “piecemeal” programmes—are not going to work. He also says that after six months of inactivity, young people are far less likely ever to work. This is urgent, but where is Labour’s urgency? This is not the first time Labour has let down young people: the number of NEETs soared to 17% after Labour’s last stint in government. The Conservatives turned that around to less than 10% in 2019. Of course, covid undermined that progress, but the Labour Government have turned a post-pandemic problem into a crisis by taxing jobs, tying up businesses in red tape, making it riskier and more expensive to hire a young person, and destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs in retail and hospitality. Like many young people, one of my first jobs was working in a local pub, but Labour has pulled the plug on that opportunity for this generation. Whenever we do get to hear Labour’s plans, we know what they will be: spending more money and taxing people more to pay for it. That is the wrong answer. The answer is jobs, to back businesses, to cut taxes, to get rid of red tape, to get government out of the way and to reform welfare—