Lord Young of Cookham (Con)

It is a pleasure to follow in the wake of my noble friend Lord Willetts and to join others in commending my noble friend Lord Evans on choosing this highly topical subject for today’s debate. He and I both sat on the Social Mobility Policy Committee, which focused directly on NEETs and youth unemployment. Only the House of Lords would put three old Etonians on a social mobility committee, but I challenge anyone reading Hansard to identify who they were. Our work has been complemented, as others have said, by the Milburn interim review. I read all 217 pages over the Whitsun Recess. It is one of the finest reports I have ever read—evidence-based, balanced, clearly written, without any jargon, and with the author’s commitment to social justice shining through. The difficulty is that he has raised enormously high expectations for his final report, due in the autumn. I will just contrast for a moment the Government’s approach to youth unemployment with that of social care. The Milburn review was announced in November last year, with a final report in early autumn—less than a year. The Casey review into social care was announced in January 2025, with a report expected in 2028. Adult social care has been kicked into touch. I will pick up two points from the review, one mentioned by my noble friend Lord Willetts. The Milburn review said that the apprenticeship levy “has been captured by employers upskilling existing workers rather than bringing in new ones”. It makes the point that only 2% of apprenticeships actually go to NEETs. That is a distorted priority that the Government should urgently correct. The second point is one paragraph of Milburn that I thought encapsulated the whole problem: “Less than half of the total £8.1 billion currently spent on key benefits for young people aged 16 to 24 years old has any participation support or requirements attached to it”. It is the polar opposite of what a participation-first welfare system should be providing and means that more and more people are being trapped on benefits. He concludes: “This is a catastrophic failure”. The Milburn review and our Social Mobility Policy Committee report both point in the same direction: tackle youth employment locally. Milburn said: “There is a strong case for local leadership to address the NEET crisis. Labour markets are local. Transport is local. Employer relationships are local … Strategic authorities are bodies that have huge potential to enact change”. That reflects the recommendation of the Select Committee: “We recommend that the Government takes note of the successful local partnerships working with those who are NEET … They should support local and combined authorities in endeavours to develop the leadership of such local initiatives”. We concluded: “The current local government restructure and the creation of mayoral combined authorities is an opportunity for Government to devolve the power and resources needed for those authorities to lead work, through local partnerships with schools, colleges, universities and employers and Skills England, to promote social mobility and address the acute NEET problem”. We saw that working in practice when we visited Liverpool. I end with a radical suggestion that takes those recommendations to a logical conclusion and builds on the point that the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, made earlier. Pick as a pilot a mayoral authority such as Bristol and work out what the DWP would spend over the next 12 months on benefits for those aged 16 to 24. Give that sum—it is probably billions—as a lump sum to the mayor to work with the universities, the technical colleges and local employers, and challenge them to invest that money in new apprenticeships, work experience, training and voluntary work. Every claimant would of course keep the benefit to which they are entitled, but I believe that unlocking that budget in that way would have a major impact, by the end of the year, on the solution we all want—namely, more jobs for young people. Do the Government have the nerve to do this?