The Church of England in Parliament

The Bishop of Leicester spoke in a debate on welfare reform and youth unemployment on 11th June 2026, raising the importance of a supportive community for young people seeking work:

The Lord Bishop of Leicester: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Rainow, for securing this debate and to all taking part. Noble Lords may differ on the diagnosis but I think the whole House shares the same concern for the young people behind these figures.

I begin by noting that none of us likes to be labelled, and the use of acronyms to refer to people is even more disconcerting. Each young person is unique and precious, whatever their circumstances, and their dignity must be at the heart of our concerns. I also want to push back on the narrative which we often see in the media—that the rise in young people who are not in education, employment or training reflects a generation that has no appetite for work. The evidence simply does not bear that out.

Research by the Learning and Work Institute shows that the vast majority of young people who are not in education or training—84%—had clear career or educational aspirations. Only 6% said they did not want to find work. Nor is it a case of unrealistic aspirations. Only 4% said they were waiting for an opportunity in a specific sector, whereas 17% said they planned to find any job they could. Similarly, research by the King’s Trust showed that one in five young people who are not in education, employment or training are applying for jobs every single day. Almost one-third have applied for jobs they did not even want, out of sheer desperation to get a foothold on the labour market. One in six had been rejected from more than 50 positions, and more than half said they feel embarrassed about not having a job. That is not a picture of idleness. It speaks of a generation knocking on doors that are just not opening for them, because more than half of so-called entry-level vacancies now demand prior experience—on average, nearly three years of it.

We should be especially wary of stigmatising young people and suggesting they have a poor work ethic or a lack of realistic ambition, because the more that narrative takes hold, the more reluctant employers will be to take a chance on them. We will, in other words, perpetuate the problem which we want to solve.

If the problem is not a lack of work ethic then the solution is not necessarily tough love. It is, at least in part, confidence, coaching and a community that believes in them. I want to recommend a model that does precisely this: the Spear programme, run by the charity Resurgo and delivered through local churches. Spear began in 2003, at St Paul’s Church in Hammersmith, as a response to the unemployed young people on its own doorstep. It has since grown to some 18 centres across the country and works with over 1,000 young people each year, all of whom face multiple significant barriers to work—from mental health issues to criminal history and adverse childhood trauma. The programme involves six weeks of group work and one-to-one coaching that tackles the psychological barriers as much as the practical ones—confidence, mindset and resilience—alongside CV writing, interview practice and job search skills. It is followed by up to a year of ongoing support, as each young person moves into work or education and, crucially, stays there. Around three-quarters of those who complete the programme are in work or training a year later—a figure I am sure noble Lords will agree is remarkable.

What I want to draw out for the House from this model is the importance of a supportive community in helping marginalised young people into work and the importance of a trusted adult to journey with each young person. As Ministers build out the youth guarantee, I urge them to recognise that the availability of placements on its own is not enough for young people who face multiple barriers to work. Many young people need the intensive personalised confidence-building support of organisations such as Spear to provide for and help them as they seek to find placements. The positive ripple effects of these will be generational, passed down to their children, as well as being important for wider society as a whole.

Hansard

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Extracts from the speeches that followed:

Lord Baker of Dorking (Con): My Lords, I very much welcome the opportunity in this debate to explore why youth unemployment is so high in our education system. It is deplorable that we have 1 million young people aged 16 to 24 who have never had work and who, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester said, want to work. The education system has failed. This debate gives us a chance to examine what is wrong with our education system and secondary schools.

The problem with our secondary schools, and the reason why unemployment is so much lower in Europe, is due to the fact that, in Europe, all the countries that my noble friend Lord Evans mentioned teach technical and vocational education to students aged under 16. Our bog-standard comprehensives do not teach students at all, and they leave school with no employability skills. It is not their fault.

When you want to know what employability skills are, you should look at the information that the Nuffield Foundation has sent to all Peers for this debate because it lists employability skills. The first is collaboration; students at school should have experience of working in teams. The second is communication, so that students can persuade their future employer of what they have learned and how it has inspired them. The third is creative thinking: organising, planning, prioritising, problem-solving and decision-making. These are not taught in our secondary schools today. It is an indictment of Conservative Governments and Labour Governments that, since the turn of the century, they have not made any significant change in this, whereas in Europe there is lots of technical education for those aged under 16. That is why, 15 years ago, Lord Dearing and I created a new type of school, a university technical college, for 14 to 18 year-old children. Children who attend those schools leave with employability skills. That is what this country needs in a much greater area, and it is very disappointing that it is not developing at all quickly.

Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl): Of course, there are lots of factors stacked up against the young, some of which we in Parliament are responsible for, including the counterproductive jobs tax that we have heard about and the consequences of uncontrolled mass migration distorting the labour market. However, we should be wary of suggesting that these are insurmountable external problems because that could fuel an exaggerated sense of grievance or fatalism among the young and a sense that there is nothing they can do to get a job and it is not their fault.

I agree with Alan Milburn that what is at stake is,

“more than an economic crisis, it is a moral one”.

However, I am a bit disappointed that the review does not dig deeper into reasons and solutions for why so many young people are detached from the world of work. I agree with the review’s argument for a participation-first welfare system, but the barriers to participation are not always external.

The moral question is why so many young people are alienated from participating per se, and why there is a seeming rejection of the work ethic. On this, I am definitely at odds with the right reverend prelate the Bishop of Leicester—it is not the first time I have been at odds with the Church, but there we go. In another recent report, Inside the Mind of a Young NEET, the authors note that

“Many young people told us they wanted to work but felt they could not immediately cope with 35 or 40 hours a week”—

cue a slew of proposals to offer part-time supported work opportunities, trial shifts and so on to help build confidence. But is that not pandering to low expectations and creating new dependencies? Do we not need to interrogate why past generations of young people grasped full-time work as an opportunity, a rite of passage to adulthood? Today, so many, too many, feel themselves unable to cope.

Lord Austin of Dudley (Non-Afl): My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Evans, on securing this important debate. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester that young people want to work but, as we have seen from Alan Milburn’s report, they are being badly let down. Of course, if young people refuse to engage in work there should be sanctions, but that is very much the minority. There are 1 million young people out of work because they have no opportunities. You have to deal with that first and that should be the top priority. One in six is now unemployed—1 million. That is the highest rate in Europe apart from Romania’s. It is not because they are sitting at home refusing to engage. The rate is four times higher than in the Netherlands and twice as high as in Ireland. As Alan Milburn says, without urgent action it will soon be 1.25 million.

More than half of these young people have not had the opportunity to work at all. The number of entry-level jobs in shops, restaurants and pubs has halved in four years, not just over the last two years of this Government. Apprenticeships have collapsed in the last decade. A lot of the problem starts at school in that children who often miss school are four times more likely to end up out of work. A generation of young people have been let down at school and college, and now, when they cannot get an apprenticeship or a job.

Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab, DWP/DfE): The number of young people not in education, employment or training has been rising for years, increasing by a quarter of a million in the three years leading up to the election. As many others have said, it is now close to a million, which is far too high. But it is not inevitable; it is a crisis of opportunity and one that we should not accept.

I agree with those who said that what it is not is a failure of ambition among young people. There are many young people keen to learn and work who are not provided with that opportunity. It is too often a failure of the system to provide the opportunity and support that they need. As others have said, it is not only a social challenge; it is an economic one as well, and one that needs early intervention and work across the whole of government. That is why I am so pleased that I sit now in two departments: the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education. One of my bosses, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, commissioned Alan Milburn to examine the underlying drivers of rising youth inactivity, because we were clear that this is not a single issue with a single cause. Also, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester identified, this is a series of individuals, quite often with differing needs and reasons why they are not working, learning or earning. In many cases, they very much want to work.