Young People and Work: Milburn Interim Report
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms McVey. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Andrew Ranger) for securing this debate. A lot has been said by hon. Members from across the House that I will seek not to repeat, but I would like to push the Minister on a couple of points coming out of the Milburn review. Its diagnosis shines a light on what was known to most of us. Indeed, Stoke-on-Trent has quite often been seen as an exemplar both of where things were terrible and of where things are getting better. Our NEET rate has dropped from 16% to below 10% because of work done by partnerships, but we still have more to do. Part of that is because our local environment has flexed to do what it needs to, sometimes against Ofsted and Government guidelines. I commend to the Minister the work done by the CEO Futures Forum, which brings together multi-academy trusts from across the city to look at the pathways that young people need now for the jobs that will exist in the future, much as my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns) said. We are constrained by the fact that good apprenticeship providers are unable to take on the numbers of young people who want to do apprenticeships, because they are held back by the de minimis rules under the apprenticeship provider and assessment register regulations. I urge the Minister and her Department to look at how, if this is a moral crusade, we can use our entire arsenal to ensure that every young person has the right pathway. If need be, that should include liberalising some of the rules around the registration of apprenticeship providers so that groups such as Dan Canavan’s Spark Group can take on the young people they want. I urge the Minister not to fall back on some of the rudimentary politics that suggests that artificially capping the wages we pay young people, in contrast to the wages we pay a full-time adult, is a way to address the NEET problem. People should be paid fairly for the work they do, regardless of their age or the way they do it. That was a Government manifesto commitment, but the siren voices are calling for it to be slowed down. I urge the Government to resist that as much as they can.