Young people ‘expected’ to engage with new work support, says McFadden

Exclusive: Work and pensions secretary echoes Andy Burnham as he announces funds to stop families in England losing benefits

Young people will be expected to engage with new support to find work, Pat McFadden has said, as he announced parents receiving benefits could get £4,500 a year if their child starts an apprenticeship.

Speaking to the Guardian, the work and pensions secretary echoed the comments of Andy Burnham when he suggested that access to support would be conditional on young people properly participating in the support that would be provided. To help with that, the new funds announced would stop families losing benefits when teenagers take up apprenticeships.

“We have an obligation to put good support in place,” he said. “And then there is an expectation that people engage with the support.”

McFadden – one of the few ministers to keep his job in the reshuffle when Burnham became prime minister – said the new bursary would compensate for a quirk in the system that could mean families lose some benefits if a teenager took up an apprenticeship.

The penalty – where the family loses the child component of universal credit – is most likely to affect single parents or disabled teenagers under 18.

McFadden said that welfare reform would mean both “opportunities and expectations”. He said: “We are trying to get the system to ask: ‘How do we help you live your fullest life? How do we maximise your opportunities?’

“One of the things that struck me about the benefits system is how sticky it is, how when people get on to these long-term benefits they tend to stay in them for a long time.”

The new bursaries of about £4,500 will be offered to families, particularly single parents with a disabled child, where they could otherwise lose approximately £80 a week because the apprenticeship salary – £258 a week – is lower than the lost benefits of £340 a week.

Burnham is seeking to address the crisis of mounting unemployment among young people and said on Tuesday morning he would aim to implement fundamental changes in the education system to emphasise technical and vocational skills, especially those relevant to local businesses.

Both Burnham and McFadden have said they are determined to reform the welfare system, especially by providing more opportunities for young people on long-term sickness benefits to return to the workforce.

The prime minister also said on Monday he wanted to change the nature of the support and make some of it “conditional upon people taking opportunities that are presented in front of them … So you might increase the conditions required to receive benefits”.

McFadden said the bursary was part of removing those unintended barriers on young people taking up work – £30m funded through the current departmental budget – but added it was crucial that young people responded to the support on offer.

“The key to it is to remove this barrier to opportunity, really,” he said. “And to stop people being trapped in the benefit system when they would otherwise take up an opportunity which is in their interest, which would put them on to the next step of a career path.

“These cliff edges are never created by design – they’re just in a big complex system, they are just there and I’m very grateful to the charities and campaigners who drew this to our attention.”

Burnham has said he wanted to avoid “crude cuts to benefits to get the welfare bill down … Often that just pushes people into even more crisis and then even more public spending in another part of the system.”

McFadden said there would be a significant system redesign when the second stage of a report from the social security minister, Stephen Timms, and disability campaigners reports back in the autumn. An interim report has already found that the criteria for personal independence payments was not fit for purpose.

“We’ll need a whole government response, not just a [Department for Work and Pensions] response, because the issues affecting young people go way beyond the boundaries of the DWP. If you take mental health issues among young people, that’s obviously going way beyond the DWP,” he said.

The government is also expected to receive the second part of Alan Milburn’s review this autumn, looking at youth unemployment and lack of engagement with education and training.Charities have welcomed plans for the bursary but said young people needed to be directly made aware of its existence by potential employers.

Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the social justice charity Nacro, said: “If more young people are to take up apprenticeships it is vital their family isn’t worse off, so introducing a new bursary is a welcome step towards narrowing the income gap.

“As the new scheme is rolled out, the government must ensure it is as easy as possible for young people to apply, and that nobody loses out because they were not directed towards support.

“We know in families where wages should outweigh benefit payments there can still be real difficulty as payments shift from parents to young people who have to take on the responsibility of contributing to overall household income.”