Government Record on Education, Employment and Welfare

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. At the same time, concerns have been raised that the proposed curriculum reforms may reduce academic rigour, at precisely the moment when the demands on young people are increasing. This matters because today’s pupils will graduate into a labour market unlike any that we have previously known. AI is transforming entire sectors of the economy. Entry-level roles that once provided a foothold into professional careers are rapidly changing and, in some sectors, starting to disappear altogether. Young people will need stronger skills, higher levels of knowledge and greater resilience than ever before. So, if opportunity is our objective, we should strengthen the institutions that have delivered educational improvement, not restrict them. It is not just academies that the Government have weakened; they have deliberately undermined the independent sector. Independent schools offer choice and the chance for social mobility through the standard of education they offer and the scholarships and partnerships they provide. Yet because of the Government’s decision to impose VAT—an unprecedented tax on education—four times more students have left independent schools than expected, and a number of schools have had to close entirely, putting unnecessary strain on the state school system. The closest thing we have to a silver bullet in public policy is education, to give children the best chance to realise their potential, so we should back all institutions that broaden their horizons, raise standards and equip young people for the challenges of a rapidly changing world—we should not undermine them. The same concern around restricting opportunity applies to employment. Britain today faces significant labour market challenges, global economic uncertainty, technological disruption, high energy costs, a high tax burden and changing patterns of work. All these are affecting employers and employees alike. Many of these forces are not within the Government’s control, but the policy response most certainly is. As the curtain is drawn on the current Prime Minister’s and Chancellor’s tenures, their signature policy—and possibly one of the most damaging—has been a £25 billion a year increase in the tax on jobs. Despite warnings of the damage that would be caused, the Government imposed a higher rate and lowered the threshold at which national insurance is levied. Instead of focusing on creating the conditions for job creation, investment, economic dynamism and growth, government action has led to employers facing rising costs and growing regulatory burdens through the Employment Rights Act that increase both the cost and the risk of taking on staff. The consequences are felt most acutely by those trying to enter the labour market for the first time. In the hospitality sector alone—one of the biggest employers of young people—the 2024 Budget amounted to £3.4 billion of annual tax increases, resulting in 100,000 job losses, falling mostly on those seeking entry level and part-time work. The figures show that more than 1 million young people aged 16 to 24 are now not in education, employment or training—the first time that figure has exceeded 1 million since 2013. Until the pandemic, NEET figures fell to below 10% in 2021 from nearly 17% in 2010. Youth unemployment has increased to 16.2%, equivalent to around 735,000 young people actively seeking work but unable to find it. We know that these are not merely statistics: they represent opportunities lost; young people unable to gain their first experience of work; skills left undeveloped; confidence undermined and ambitions postponed. Indeed, the recent Milburn review warned of a growing risk of a “lost generation”, because when opportunity disappears at the beginning of a career, the effects can last for decades. There is of course an important role for programmes that support young people into work, particularly if they find that they do not have the skills needed to do the jobs in their area, and the previous Government had such schemes. However, we are now in the slightly surreal situation of the Government offering subsidies of £3,000 to employers to fund jobs for young people to deal with the damaging consequences of the employment taxes they have increased and the regulatory and wage costs they have imposed. That surely cannot be the answer to increasing opportunity across the jobs market. That brings me, finally, to welfare. A compassionate welfare system is essential. It should provide support during periods of hardship, illness and transition, but at its heart it must be designed to help people move towards independence and participation in the labour market wherever possible. Increasingly, however, we appear to be moving towards a model that places greater emphasis on long-term dependency than on economic mobility. Every day, 1,000 people are signed off on to benefits with no requirements to look for work. Welfare spending is set to hit £370 billion by the end of the Parliament. This is simply unfair. It is unfair to taxpayers—the people going out to work to pay for those who do not—and to the people who are written off and not supported to find a job. The Work and Pensions Secretary has said that all his colleagues want to talk about is how to raise more tax to spend on welfare. This is not simply fiscally unsustainable; it leads to the gradual erosion of the principle that work provides dignity, purpose and independence. When young people see limited rewards from entering employment and growing financial incentives to remain outside the labour market, the long-term effect is fewer opportunities for advancing and greater dependency on the state. That is neither socially desirable nor economically sustainable. The Government’s response to the challenges we face in education, employment and welfare has too often been the same: more intervention and regulation, greater centralisation and increased cost. Yet the evidence suggests that lasting opportunity is rarely created by government direction. Opportunity is created when schools are trusted to excel, when businesses are confident enough to invest and hire and when individuals are empowered to build independent lives through work. The challenge facing Britain today is not merely one of economic growth; it is a question of whether the next generation will enjoy greater opportunities than the last. On education, welfare and employment, the Government should ask themselves one question: are their policies expanding opportunity or restricting it? Unfortunately, too often over the past two years, the answer has appeared to be the latter. If we want to give young people the chance to succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we must reverse that trend. We must trust individuals, institutions, business and enterprise more, and place opportunity, not state control, at the centre of public policy. I hope that the new Burnham Government will learn the lessons of the past two years and look to change course: to reduce the welfare bill and focus tirelessly on supporting those who can work into employment; to cut taxes on jobs and ensure that businesses can grow their workforces, invest in their futures and thrive again; and to once again trust head teachers to deliver the best education they can for their pupils. I beg to move.

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’”, which was Labour’s time in office. It was a complete reversal of what had been happening under the Labour Government. My final quote—I want to keep this short—is from an interesting piece by the Financial Times data expert John Burn-Murdoch, “What if the UK isn’t actually the sick man of Europe?”, from 6 December 2024. Time permits me to read only the final paragraph of his piece: “It turns out the apparent rise in Britain’s illness-related inactivity is mostly not about deteriorating health, but about incentives within the benefit system”— incentives that were put there by the Government in which the noble Baroness served in the Cabinet for six years. To finish the quote: “Policies focused on the latter stand the best chance of getting Britons working”. In other words, it is an absolute con. There was good progress under the Labour Government until 2010, and after that it reversed. We on the Economic Affairs Committee could not understand it. We thought we had got rid of the system whereby it paid not to work. Everybody around the table was gobsmacked, yet it had been made possible to be better off not working under the Tory Government of which the noble Baroness was a key member.

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. So there is a real issue around how the Government looks at the funding formula, because it is based on pupil numbers rather than the actual cost of running schools. It is a huge issue, and not just a London-based one; it also affects rural and coastal communities. We are not going to be able to build a strong economy if our school system is hollowed out. I have some questions for the Minister. We know from Milburn and House of Lords Library research that over 1 million young people are NEET now, and we are going to get Milburn’s recommendations. First, can the Minister confirm that the Government will fully fund all the recommendations from the Milburn review? Secondly, what will they do about tackling the drop-off in primary school teacher trainees? As I said, if we do not fix this problem now, it will follow through. Both Milburn and the fantastic work that the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, has done on tackling the issues around white working-class boys not achieving their potential identified that these issues start at a very young age. Finally, as I am running out of time, can the Minister please comment on the funding formula, which is causing huge issues for our primary school children and schools?

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. On employment, these cuts affect lecturers, researchers, librarians and professional staff, whose expertise underpins teaching, innovation and the wider economy. Humanities graduates go on to become teachers, civil servants, diplomats, lawyers, journalists and leaders in our creative industries. They also develop the critical thinking, and communication and analytical skills, that employers consistently value across many sectors. Weakening that pipeline weakens the nation. These concerns have been brought home to me through a friend and colleague at the University of Exeter, who has described the uncertainty surrounding proposed reductions in humanities posts. Sadly, Exeter is not alone. Similar pressures are being felt across the sector, with consequences for staff, students and local communities alike. If we are serious about improving social mobility, we cannot allow educational opportunity to become narrower or more geographically uneven. A country that values aspiration must ensure that students, wherever they live and whatever their background, continue to have full access to the breadth of higher education. Social mobility is not simply about helping individuals to succeed; it is about ensuring that every community can retain and develop its talent, and that no young person’s ambitions are limited by where they happen to grow up. I therefore ask the Minister: what steps will the Government take to ensure that our universities remain financially sustainable, that students continue to enjoy a broad range of subjects, and that the vital contribution of the humanities to our economy, our public services and our national life is not lost?

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. In the past, local government also was a key partner in helping to equip school leavers for the world of work. But, sadly, the Government are creating yet another barrier to the improvement of NEETs’ prospects by the chaos they are currently imposing on that sector, with uncertainty, delay and confusion surrounding its structure and its functions. Nor can there now be any sensible planning because we are told that the new Prime Minister is intent on creating a new regionalised structure on top of, or maybe instead of—we are currently not to know—the structures that we have, which means that any kind of sensible planning that is taking place will be ended by the uncertainty that the Government are imposing on the entire thing. However, of course time does not stop for the NEETs. They need urgent help to get on with their lives. The Minister in the last debate on 11 June outlined a number of measures to be useful, and indeed many of them were. But, actually, the Government need not to introduce limited measures but to tackle the fundamental issues I have described. I look forward to hearing the Minister’s response at the end of the debate.

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. At times in our country, you need to make great changes. I was lucky in the 1980s, when great changes were necessary. I think Andy Burnham will be lucky, because there are now great changes that have to be made. I am not just talking about young men; in our colleges, we have many young women, particularly from ethnic minorities, who desperately want to study and master engineering and computing. I am very optimistic. I add one warming word for the Minister. She is the only Minister in the Government, including the Commons, who understands education deeply. She is deep into it. If there is any justice, she should be the new Secretary of State. I do not think that the new Prime Minister will appoint a Secretary of State from this House, but I hope that we do not lose her. She likes UTCs. She went to one only last week—one of the most difficult ones to reach, up in the north-west of England next to Sellafield. I hope very much that she keeps her job, because she does like UTCs.

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. The report recommends making government business support conditional not only on decent labour standards but on meeting reinvestment requirements. It also highlights the importance of corporate governance reform. This is vital to address the British sickness of short-termism, which puts shareholder returns above the long-term interests of the company. Does my noble friend the Minister agree with the diagnosis that Britain needs more value creation and more productive investment? Does she agree that we need more government action, including on procurement power and corporate governance rules, to drive it?

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. Much has been made of this appalling figure of 1 million young people not in education, employment or training. Those who do not study history are destined to repeat it. Many of us came into public life at the time of the race riots and terrible unrest, when young people, then Black people, had no work, no self-esteem, no recognition and no respect. That leads to crime, lawlessness and despair. The urgency of the practical steps needed to lift this generation forward cannot be exaggerated. I commend my noble friend Lord Baker. I visited his UTC in Hull, the Baker Dearing UTC, and it is extraordinary to see the way it works with employers and the university to deliver results. At a time when there is disenchantment with university—my noble friend Lord Willetts will no doubt address this problem—more and more young people want skills, a vocation and a job. It is extraordinary how many have said, “I don’t think university is for me”. So we have to look even more urgently at technical and other education. I support those who argue for greater regionalism. I have long been a great admirer of the noble Lord, Lord O’Neill of Gatley, whom I very much hope will be a leading light in the new Burnham Government. He argues that skills should be completely devolved, because Whitehall cannot know what each labour market needs. He makes a powerful case for joining health, welfare and employment. I very much hope that, in the same way as Andy Street did in Birmingham and as happened in Manchester, we have a better result with more regionalism, innovation and opportunity. The critical test is in delivering a complex achievable plan. Let us bring an end to government by press notices.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, for introducing this debate at a time when over 1 million young people are NEET. In 2009, I was appointed Employment Minister in the teeth of the global financial crisis. The Prime Minister was clear: my job was to prevent the scarring effect of long-term youth unemployment and to get the headline rate to fall in time for the 2010 general election. When I told the then Permanent Secretary at the DWP that this was my task, he told me that to do so would defy history and was impossible. He was wrong. We rapidly rolled out the future jobs fund to give young people who had been on benefits for more than six months real paid work, rather than a life on benefits. It created some 150,000 jobs, and the department’s later evaluation found participants far more likely to be in unsubsidised employment two years on, and a net benefit to society of around £7,750 for every young person who took part. With determined focus, we can tackle impossible problems. The future jobs fund was, of course, scrapped by the incoming Government in 2010 before they published the evidence that it had succeeded. This Government inherited 872,000 young people—more than one in eight—who are NEET. The number is rising much faster today. The Milburn review tells us that the cost of NEETs is £125 billion a year, which is more than our entire schools budget. The attainment gap between poorer children and their peers stood as wide as it did three decades ago, and a generation’s mental health was left to fray: close to 1 million children were referred to mental health services in a single year, yet fewer than a third were seen. Tens of thousands were waiting over two years, many reaching crisis before anyone had reached them. Apprenticeship starts for young people fell by more than 40%. The entry-level rungs of the ladder were pulled away for over a decade, and artificial intelligence is now removing the very junior roles that are a way in. This is not a blip. It is not about NI and the minimum wage; it is structural and it was many years in the making. We should all hold our hands up. This crisis begins in our schools. We need a curriculum that develops and challenges all young people. I am with the noble Lord, Lord Baker: I would love us to end the national curriculum at 14 and build a single 14-19 phase with genuine academic, technical and applied routes; and a space for local content, designed with employers, that fits with local industrial strategies. What the Minister is achieving post 16 is important, but it needs a better experience in key stage 4. We must also change school behaviour by introducing accountability measures built on destinations—on whether a school actually lowers a child’s risk of becoming NEET, as suggested in the Milburn report. When we reward only exam results, we should not be surprised when the system loses sight of the child. Behind the headline figure of 1 million are 1 million lives. These young people have not given up on work or on learning. They have not given up on the hope of a better life. The only question that should trouble this House is whether we have given up on them. In 2009, we did not. Let us resolve that we will not now—that we will stop building exam factories and start, once more, to build hope.

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, on calling this debate. One can sense in the interventions from all sides of the House the deep disappointment and frustration that we now—once again, shockingly—have 1 million young people who are NEET. It is particularly frustrating, as tackling the problem is not a deeply mysterious intractable issue that cannot possibly be addressed; it is absolutely solvable. The noble Baroness, Lady Evans, set out in her excellent speech the wider policies that are necessary to bring down the number of NEETs. I will focus on specific policies aimed at those young people who, tragically, are already NEET or may be about to become so. The evidence from a range of initiatives under successive Governments, including those going back to the 1980s and 1990s, is that some combination of the following is needed: direct support for building up employability skills, so that employers do not think that it is high risk to take on someone who is NEET or about to be NEET; plus some lowering of the costs to employers of taking them on, either through a general reduction or specific incentives and rewards. There have been lots of initiatives over the decades. They work, but the trouble is they cost money, partly because there is a dead-weight cost. Some young people get off benefits and into work anyway and the Treasury does not like expensive schemes, so to win the argument for more of these programmes they have to be as well targeted as possible. There is an increasing amount of data across Whitehall now—from the NHS about family circumstances, from the Department for Education itself and from other government bodies—that would enable us to identify young people who are at greatest risk of being NEET for whom interventions would be most effective. However, across Whitehall you hear, “GDPR stops us sharing the data”. The data is not brought together and those 16 and 17 year-olds are tragically lost to the system. There is an initiative, Kickstarter, that tries to break down data barriers to pooling information across Whitehall. The Department for Education participates in this initiative and its programme typically, and admirably, is about early years. It identifies children at the age of two and a half who are at risk of turning up at school, at five, underprepared. Why does the Department for Education not also run a Kickstarter initiative to identify NEETs by pooling data from across Whitehall, so that policies and programmes to help young people into work are effectively targeted and more affordable?