Pat McFadden MP: speeches

Speeches

• 29 Jun 2026 · Youth Guarantee · Hansard source

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  In his review Alan Milburn considered that issue and said that, “the UK’s NEET crisis is much more long-term and deep-seated than any decisions taken in the last few years.” As I said earlier, 400,000 more people are in work this year than last year, and the number of young people in employment is up since the election. Our policies are designed to help business rally to the cause of getting more young people into work, and I am pleased that we are introducing hiring incentives of £3,000 to help businesses take on a young unemployed person who has been out of work for six months or more. There is a good reason to target that group with opportunity, because the longer people are on those benefits, the greater the consequences that can have for their lives in the long term. Their whole future is in front of them, which is why it is right that we help them.

• 29 Jun 2026 · Youth Guarantee · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for his commitment to expanding opportunity for young people in his constituency and to reducing the NEET youth rate. As he knows, I was pleased to open the Peterborough youth hub some months ago, and my Department is working with the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough strategic authority on the youth guarantee trailblazer. I congratulate Inspire2Ignite. I value positive feedback from the Minister’s visit to the BRDG site, and I will ensure that my hon. Friend gets a meeting with a Minister to discuss these issues further.

• 29 Jun 2026 · Youth Guarantee · Hansard source

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  I thank the right hon. Gentleman and send him commiserations for whatever has left him reliant on his crutches today. I am happy to congratulate the businesses he mentioned in his constituency. He raises a serious point: it is important not only to come up with the right policy, but to make it simple for businesses to use. That is something I have stressed to my officials; it is important that this scheme is simple to apply for. The money will be given in two instalments—one in the second month, and one in the fifth month—to ensure that hiring is sustained, but I entirely agree that good policy should be matched by a simple application process.

• 29 Jun 2026 · Youth Guarantee · Hansard source

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  As I said, earlier this spring we announced the expansion of youth hubs to all planned areas and the launch of phase one of the jobs guarantee for the long-term unemployed, first in six areas and later to the whole country. From today, we are rolling out expanded employment support for young people on universal credit to all jobcentres in Britain. As I mentioned, from tomorrow, we are opening the youth jobs grant, which will give employers a £3,000 hiring bonus to take on a young person who has been out of work for six months or more.

• 29 Jun 2026 · Unemployed Young People · Hansard source

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  More than 1 million young people are currently not in education, employment or training. Youth employment in the UK has not reached its pre-financial crash level in any year since, and there has been a sharp rise in recent years in the number of young people not in education, employment or training. That is why we are investing an additional £2.5 billion over the next three years into the youth guarantee and the growth and skills levy.

• 29 Jun 2026 · Unemployed Young People · Hansard source

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  We have the second-fastest growing economy in the G7, we have 400,000 more people in work than we did last year and the number of young people in employment is up by 74,000 since the election. In the whole 14 years in which the hon. Member’s party was in power, it went up by only 1,000.

• 29 Jun 2026 · Unemployed Young People · Hansard source

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  I appreciate that the DWP plays a role as a local employer, but it is important that we deliver our service as efficiently as possible on behalf of the taxpayer and that we get the maximum value for money for that. With regard to the hon. Member’s request, there has been an offer of a meeting with a Minister from the Department; I hope that he will take that up.

• 29 Jun 2026 · Unemployed Young People · Hansard source

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  The hon. Member raises an important issue. Whenever I discuss youth unemployment and opportunity with MPs, they often identify transport links as a barrier. We are capping single bus fares at £3 on thousands of routes in England outside London until March 2027, but I believe that there is more that we can and should do, because he is right that connectivity is really important and is linked to opportunity.

• 29 Jun 2026 · Unemployed Young People · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend not only for her question but for the wonderful work she has done and the advice she has given me on closing the disability employment gap and championing the rights of partially sighted people. She asks about access, which is important. Alongside our jobcentre network, we have mobile jobcentre vans, and over the next few years we will be opening 360 youth hubs to get services to where young people are in the local community.

• 14 May 2026 · Getting Britain Working Again · Hansard source

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  That is precisely what we are doing, including by providing apprenticeship courses that are shorter than the usual eight-month minimum, because employers have told us that such short courses are exactly what they need. I am all in favour of more flexibility in the apprenticeship system to suit what employers need. Getting Britain working is also about the levels of investment in the economy: it is about the roads and railways we build, the capital programmes in education and health, and the year-on-year modernisation of the country. Here too there is a contrast with what we inherited. Compared with the plans that we inherited, there will be £120 billion more public investment over the course of this Parliament. That is what getting Britain working looks like—building and modernising the country. Underpinning all of this are measures in the King’s Speech to raise living standards in every part of the country, to attract investment, to work in partnership with business, to take advantage of new trading opportunities, to reduce the burden of unnecessary regulations, to unlock airport expansion, to build the roads that need to be built and, finally, to deliver a fair deal for the north of England. At the heart of our reforms should be the young, for the simple and obvious reason that if we do not get the young into work, there can be lifelong effects. We have almost a million young people not in education, training or employment. As I said in response to the hon. Member for Gordon and Buchan (Harriet Cross), in the last three years of the Conservative Government, that figure went up by a quarter of a million. Although the numbers have barely moved since the election, they are still far too high.

• 14 May 2026 · Getting Britain Working Again · Hansard source

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  If it was down to those policies, we would not have seen a rise of a quarter of a million in the NEET—not in education, employment or training—numbers in the last three years of the hon. Lady’s party’s time in office. My point is that this did not come from nowhere, and we have to understand that. If we are to have a serious response, education, health treatment, youth apprenticeships and changes to the welfare system itself all have a part to play. On the health front, I have good news to report: waiting lists today are down by 110,000—the biggest monthly drop since 2008. Elective waiting time targets have been hit, and four-hour waiting time targets have been hit. This is how we get Britain working, whereas simply picking a number for benefit cuts, with nothing behind it, is not an answer; it is a press release. The Conservative party has shown no understanding of how people end up on benefits in the first place.

• 14 May 2026 · Getting Britain Working Again · Hansard source

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  I have to disappoint the hon. Lady. If this Government were responsible, it would not be case that youth employment never in a single year reached the pre-financial crash levels when her party was in power. If this Government were responsible, we would not have seen the number of young people who are not in education, employment or training rise by a quarter of a million. Beyond the hiring bonuses and the youth hubs, we are offering more work experience or workplace training with a guaranteed interview, designed in partnership with employers. For those who have been out of work for 18 months, we are offering a six-month paid job placement of 25 hours a week at national minimum wage rates. The reason we are doing all this is that we will not stand back and allow young people to graduate from school to a life on benefits. There has been too much of that in recent years, and to do that would be to accept the scarring effect for the rest of their lives and to accept the huge cost to the country and to businesses in lost talent. Changing this situation should be a cause for us all, and it should certainly be a Labour cause, to give hope to the country’s young people and to show that we believe in them, we back them and we want them to have a better future. This is a generational challenge. Of course it is an issue for young people, but it is also an issue for their parents and grandparents, because they all want a better future for young people, and so do we. There is an urgency about this issue. As the population ages and net migration falls, we need the young people of this country more than ever. They are our greatest resource and our greatest asset, and an investment in them is an investment in the future for all of us. In the volatile times that His Majesty spoke about, people look for security, and rightly so, but the future is not just about security; the future is about building opportunity too. It is about not accepting so many young people being written off and about giving them a chance to change the story of their lives. That is the message at the heart of the King’s Speech and that is what is at the heart of our youth guarantee. It is at the heart of all the changes in welfare reform that I have listed, and it will be at the heart of the changes to come, and I recommend them to the House.

• 14 May 2026 · Getting Britain Working Again · Hansard source

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  Apprenticeships are really valuable and important. I visited construction apprentices with the Prime Minister just a couple of days ago, so I heartily endorse what the hon. Gentleman says. The issue of youth employment is really important to us because of the long-term consequences of young people staying on benefits. Let me illustrate this for the House. A young person under the age of 25 who is on the health element of universal credit is now less likely to get a job than someone over 55 on the same benefit. A 20-year-old on incapacity benefit is more likely to turn 30 and still be claiming it than to have held a steady job for a year. Perhaps worst of all, a young unemployed person is over 70% more likely than their peers to die prematurely. Changing those stories has to be at the heart of what we are doing. There are practical ways of doing that. We know that many disabled people—young and old—and people with health conditions want to work, but have been held back by the fear of losing their benefits if things do not work out, so just last month we changed the law to bring in the right to try. Keeping people locked on benefits because they lack the confidence to work is in no one’s interests—not the individuals’ and not the state’s. The change means that entering employment will not automatically trigger a benefit reassessment. This is practical welfare reform and this is what getting Britain working looks like. We also know that disabled people and people with health conditions need localised support to get back into work. There is no greater fan than me of the wonderful work that our elected local mayors are doing, so we are putting £1 billion of funding into local areas to help 300,000 people into employment over the next few years. That is what practical welfare reform looks like. Today, the Department has published new figures on fraud and error. They show continued progress and a fall since the post-pandemic period, but this is an ongoing effort. There is always more to do because there are unscrupulous individuals who will try to game the system, but whether it is £5,000 or £5 million from an undisclosed source—possibly someone located abroad—people are expected to declare it. There cannot be one rule for some and another rule for everyone else. In the coming weeks, my right hon. Friend the Minister for Social Security and Disability will set out our plans to deliver our manifesto commitment to tackle the Access to Work backlog. This important scheme provides grants to thousands of disabled people to help them get into and stay in work, through things like specialist equipment, assistive technology and adaptations. Members from across the House have raised with me the issue of backlogs and waiting times that grew under the Conservative Government. Well, under this Government, we are changing that to reduce the backlog and to help more disabled people into work. This is practical welfare reform and this is what getting Britain working looks like. We are restoring fairness in the system too. We are providing better value for money in the Motability scheme, with a target for half those cars to be made in Britain by 2035, so that this important scheme supports the British car industry too. We are stopping those who have not contributed from getting a British pension on the cheap. The work of reform will continue this year when, in the coming weeks, we receive interim reports from both the Milburn and Timms reviews, before they conclude later in the year. We will bring forward further proposals for reform, with work and opportunity at their heart, when those reviews have reported.

• 14 May 2026 · Getting Britain Working Again · Hansard source

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  I will outline the changes to the system that we are making. At the heart of it, we have to change the question that the system asks in order to have a system that is suited better to the conditions of today. We should ask people not just what benefit they are entitled to, but how we can help them change their lives, and we have begun that task. The change to universal credit that came into force last month narrowed the gap between the health element and the standard element. Crucially, it is matched by an increase in employment support. Another change is the provision of £3.8 billion to help people into work over the next few years, ensuring personalised help to maximise people’s chances of moving into a good, secure job. We have to change the old Tory habit of people being signed off and written off, and instead move to a system that more actively helps people into work. Nowhere is that more true than among the young, because the longer young people are left on benefits or out of work, the harder it is to come off and the worse the consequences are. The issue with the system is not just about monthly income; it is about the story of people’s lives and how we change it.

• 14 May 2026 · Getting Britain Working Again · Hansard source

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  It is a pleasure to open today’s King’s Speech debate on behalf of the Government. As His Majesty said yesterday, we are living in “an increasingly dangerous and volatile world”. This debate is about the labour market, so let us start with some facts. We have 332,000 more people in work than a year ago; the third highest employment rate in the G7; unemployment lower than most OECD countries and lower than the EU average; unemployment down in the three months to February; and economic inactivity down by over 350,000 since the election—it is lower today than in 13 of the 14 years of the previous Government. Since the general election, real wages are up by more than in the first 10 years of the last Government, and this morning’s growth figures were up by 0.6% in the first quarter of this year—services up by 0.8% and construction up by 0.4%. That is the fastest GDP per capita growth in four years and the highest GDP growth in the G7 reported this year. That is on top of GDP per capita growth last year, and on top of six interest rate cuts since the general election. Our economic management has put the UK in a stronger position, better placed to weather the storm of global shocks, and better placed to weather the volatility of which His Majesty spoke yesterday. The leadership task for the country now is to lead the country through the consequences of what is happening in the middle east, because there is no doubt that the shock from the Iran war and the continued closure of the strait of Hormuz is real. It will affect prices, it will affect jobs and it will affect growth. Our Prime Minister took the decision to keep us out of that war, but the UK, like most countries, will be affected by its consequences. However, none of those consequences were thought about by the Leader of the Opposition or the leader of Reform when they were urging us to get involved. What did the Leader of the Opposition say?

• 14 May 2026 · Getting Britain Working Again · Hansard source

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  I will proceed, if the hon. Lady does not mind. Unlike the Conservatives, who did nothing about the number of young people not in education, training or employment, we are doing something about it, because we will not leave a young generation behind. We will not give up on young people, and that is why our youth guarantee is so important. It will invest £2.5 billion in support for young people and employers over the next few years. From June, there will be hiring bonuses of £3,000 for employers who take on a young person who has been out of work for six months. For small businesses, there will be a hiring bonus of £2,000 to take on a young apprentice, and the Government will pay for all the training courses for young apprentices employed by small and medium-sized enterprises. [ Interruption. ] Youth hubs across the country will take support out of the jobcentre to where young people are, giving them access to community-based advice, skills training, mental health support, housing advice and careers guidance. In the spirit of generosity, I will give way to the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Alison Griffiths).

• 14 May 2026 · Getting Britain Working Again · Hansard source

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  Let me read this out for the hon. Gentleman. The Leader of the Opposition said that the Government were “too scared to make foreign interventions”. She also said: “I say to Labour MPs that we are in this war whether they like it or not. What is the Prime Minister waiting for?” —[ Official Report , 4 March 2026; Vol. 781, c. 803.] That is what she said. As for the leader of Reform, the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage), he said: “We should do all we can to support the operation. I make that perfectly, perfectly clear.” Instead of trying to douse the flames, they sought to pour as much petrol on them as possible. They would have jumped in with both feet, displaying not only a failure of judgment but a total disregard for the price that will be paid by British consumers in higher prices and higher interest rates. That is how much they cared about keeping Britain working when it came to the biggest judgment that this country has had to make for a long time. The Conservatives’ record when in office was: the lowest business investment in the G7; wages flatlining for their entire period in office; the worst Parliament on record for living standards; and the public finances trashed as debt soared. The reason I point that out is that month after month, and nowhere more than in the arena of welfare, the Conservative party finds things that it is outraged about in the system that it built, it designed and it created. Before I come to the system itself, let me state something that is obvious but too often left out of these debates: the welfare system is often the end of a process in people’s lives, not the beginning. I will tell the House what contributes to higher welfare bills and to people not working: hollowing out the NHS and leaving one person in seven on waiting lists, with a higher likelihood that they are unfit for work; increasing child poverty by 700,000, making it less likely that children will be ready for work when they leave school; explicitly rejecting the post-covid education recovery plan, and doing nothing about rocketing absenteeism from schools; neglecting our town centres and high streets, leaving too many places without hope or confidence in the future; and presiding over a 40% decline in youth apprenticeship starts, kicking away the first step in the career ladder for those who lose out. You cannot do all that and then stand at the Dispatch Box and credibly express outrage about the rise in benefit bills. It did not come from nowhere, and if we are going to tackle this area, we have to understand that.

• 14 May 2026 · Getting Britain Working Again · Hansard source

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  I refer the hon. Gentleman to the figures that I just read out. For the first time in many years, the NHS is heading in the right direction. That is good for people’s health, and it is also good for getting people back to work. As I said, the Conservatives show no understanding of how people end up on benefits in the first place. They are like a workman who wanders around someone’s house asking, “Who installed that?”, when the answer every time is that they installed it. The Conservatives say that the welfare bill is too high, but it went up by £100 billion when they were in power. They say that they want more face-to-face appointments, but they shut them down almost entirely, and then the right hon. Member for Central Devon (Sir Mel Stride), now the shadow Chancellor, signed off a bunch of contracts that allowed the assessors to work from home. The Conservatives say that there are too many people on health benefits, but they designed the system, they designed the gateways, and they designed the differences in income that have made that happen. We did not just inherit a mess; we inherited their mess. In fact, the shadow Chancellor personally oversaw the biggest single increase in welfare spending on record during his time as Work and Pensions Secretary. Two weeks ago, the Leader of the Opposition railed against there being 1.5 million more people on universal credit. She was outraged by the figure, as she often is, but there was only one problem: around 80% of the increase was a legacy transfer from old benefits that was decided, organised and begun by the Conservative party. It is no wonder the chair of the UK Statistics Authority wrote to the Leader of the Opposition to correct her. Her letter said of the figures quoted: “A substantial proportion reflects the ongoing transfer of claimants from legacy benefits to Universal Credit. This process has been a longstanding policy and has been implemented at scale by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) since May 2022, predating the current administration.” When it comes to the Conservatives owning their record, they might as well be giving CV advice to the leader of the Green party. As the King’s Speech made clear yesterday, reform of the welfare system is under way and will continue. Support must always be there for those who need it, but circling the wagons around the status quo is not the right answer. Nor do I believe that the system can act as a fantasy cashpoint for every cause going; instead, I believe that our task is to recast this system to put work and opportunity at its heart.

• 27 Apr 2026 · Apprenticeships · Hansard source

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  I referred in my previous answer to the step I am taking, which is to put in place a £2,000 hiring incentive for small businesses taking up a new apprentice. If it is someone who has been unemployed and on universal credit for six months, there is the potential for an additional £3,000 hiring incentive on top of the £2,000. We want to incentivise small businesses to take on apprentices, for reasons that I think are shared right across the House and because of the great opportunities that they entail.

• 27 Apr 2026 · Apprenticeships · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend will know that when people complete an apprenticeship, their chances of employment are very high. I am pleased to report that apprenticeship achievement rates are up in the latest figures, as are the apprenticeship start numbers.

• 27 Apr 2026 · Apprenticeships · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is right to say that promoting apprenticeships must start in schools. Our brilliant apprenticeship ambassador network brings together about 3,000 employers and apprentices, who go into schools and colleges and share stories about how apprenticeships can transform young lives. Those ambassadors have now reached 97% of the state-funded secondary schools and colleges in England—nearly 3,500 in the past three years—but, for the reasons that my hon. Friend has given, we have got to do more work to make information about apprenticeships as clear and easy to use as possible.

• 27 Apr 2026 · Apprenticeships · Hansard source

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  It is important to remember that apprenticeships are paid and that the people undergoing them get a wage. When we are considering the overall economic impact on a family’s income, we have to take that into account. Frankly, if the hon. Member pushes me and asks me whether it is better for that income to come from benefits or the constructive work of an apprenticeship, I know which one I would pick.

• 27 Apr 2026 · Apprenticeships · Hansard source

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  We always listen to representations that ask for more funding for many good causes. On the issue of construction, a specific construction sector skills package was announced last year. It is aimed precisely at training the bricklayers, electricians and plumbers we need to meet our construction targets, not only in housing but in the many investment projects around the country that are being supported by this Government.

• 27 Apr 2026 · Apprenticeships · Hansard source

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  May I congratulate my hon. Friend on what sounds like a fantastic initiative? She puts her finger on something very important: sometimes people who narrowly lose out on a particular apprenticeship could benefit from one elsewhere. I did refer to the work that we are doing to try to improve the information, and the initiative she has taken is a great example of what can be done. Just because people do not get their first choice should not mean that they lose out on the opportunity of an apprenticeship entirely.

• 27 Apr 2026 · Apprenticeships · Hansard source

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  I agree with the shadow Minister that work is the answer. As I said a moment ago, apprenticeship starts are up on the latest figures and apprenticeship achievement rates are up. The reforms that we are putting in place will mean more youth apprenticeship starts, and that is where the money should be directed, because that is where the need is greatest.