Social Mobility Symposium: Speech highlights from Angela Rayner, Helen Whately and Lord Blunkett

Today, Tuesday 23rd June, the Social Mobility Commission hosted our 2026 Social Mobility Symposium in Westminster. 

Three keynote speakers, four panels and more than 20 panelists – from across the political and policy spectrum – engaged in a day of debate and discussion on how to lower the high number of young people Not in Education, Employment or Training (NEET) and improve social mobility. 

Angela Rayner, MP for Ashton-under-Lyne, previous Deputy Prime Minister, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government and Deputy Labour Leader, said in her speech:

“When the Social Mobility Commission invited me to speak today, they explained that the organisation uses data to analyse the cause of social mobility in the country. I thought, I know a thing or two about that, because I’m one of those data points.

“I was a teenage mum in 1999, single parent, on Bridgeall Estate, and I was a ‘NEET’ at that time. So I’ve lived it. I know that intervention makes a real difference. I hope I can be a bit optimistic about what I say the State did for me and what I see it do for people of my community today. It was the state that gave me and my siblings a better chance at life. 

“We didn’t ask to be born into the circumstances of our family unit. But what I will say is all three of us, me and my siblings, are now contributing. And that was only possible because the state, our community, our area, and my parents brought us up. We all worked hard. But there was no way we could have done it alone. And now we are contributing more than we take. And that is the value of an economy that cares. 

“It was every single taxpayer in the 80s and 90s who contributed to my life chances, it’s a community that raises children. It’s a common endeavor. And it was the idea, as a country, we are bigger than the sum of our parts, that gave me and my siblings a hand up.
…
“When it comes to NEETs we are not dealing with a failure of the ambition of young people. It is a system, I believe, that is letting them down. Leaving them sidelined with poor health disabilities and loneliness. It is the system that fails to prepare people for work, and employment support that locks young people out of work. It will take the same collective intervention that changed my life, if we are going to help young people into employment, education and training.
…
“The Social Mobility Commission exists because Gordon Brown saw children growing up in poverty. He refused to cross the road and look the other way. Whatever your political affiliation, we in this room will not look away. The scale of the problem is now bigger than it was in 2010. Parents are living with the reality of low wages, high cost and struggling to keep a roof over their heads, now whatever the method, we are all motivated by a desire to give people opportunity and tackle poverty. Ideology never put food on my table when I was growing up and we must be pragmatic about the best way to improve outcomes and I welcome the opportunity to have that debate today. Social Mobility isn’t just about university access and elite jobs and social mobility shouldn’t mean that you have to change your social class to improve your life.”

Helen Whately, MP for Faversham and Mid Kent and Shadow Minister for Work and Pensions, said in her speech:

“In the face of economic headwinds, many businesses are using AI to cut costs and preserve margins rather than seeing it as a springboard for growth and the consequence of all of this is we now have more people competing for fewer jobs and we have a generation of young people who are paying the price. That price is enormous. Let’s start with the young people themselves, we know from the financial crash generation, the scars of unemployment run deep and last long. Lower wages, slower careers and poorer health.Then there is the cost to the country. Billions in benefits, 3 billion in tax revenues forgone every year, 38 billion in lost economic output. This is not just a social priority, it’s a fiscal one and it’s getting worse. Every month of delay is another cohort of young people drifting further away from the labour market. There is no time to waste. 

“… first and foremost, the most important thing is jobs. We need more jobs. Jobs that young people can actually get. That means making it cheaper and easier for businesses to hire. We must cut the tax burden and roll back employment red tape. What good is gold-plated rights for workers if you can’t even get work. Governments cannot create jobs but governments can get out of the way of businesses that do. We need to back businesses to invest and expand. We need to appreciate the nation’s entrepreneurs, risk takers and wealth creators and inspire this generation of young people to become the next generation of great business people.

“…let’s make sure young people have the skills they need to do those jobs, the means to get to wherever they are, the resilience to get through the bad days and the certainty that they will be better off if they do. That means making sure work always pays better than welfare…We need to make sure our education system does equip young people with the skills for modern work and the ability to cope in the uncertainty of the time we are living in. Not just to cope but to thrive.
…
“Let’s be honest about the limits of the state. Sometimes what it most needs to do is get out the way, get off the backs of the organisations at the coal face and stop pushing people into a dead end of dependency. And let’s raise our expectations of what young people can do. Give them the chance to take control of their destinies. First and foremost, make sure the jobs are there for them because a job is more than a pay packet at the end of the month it’s a chance to become someone to build something to make something of your life… We have a lost generation before they even get a chance to start.”

Lord Blunkett, Former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Education and Home Office, said in his speech:

“I didn’t want youngsters with my background to have to struggle in the way I had. Not that it didn’t teach me things, it did, but we don’t set out to make kids struggle. We normally set out to liberate them. We normally set out to provide a trampoline, or an escalator for them to get on and find their way. There are two pots of society, two very different strata, who suffer very badly. One is the extremely rich, whose children are entitled and don’t have to do anything even to earn their living… and the others whose family setting, the people they are born to, the area they are born into, the conditions they experience, the lack of interest and aspiration, the ability to nurture and develop, the lack of hope in terms of will things be better,  which is what the work of the Social Mobility Commission, and what all of what you are doing, is about.
…
“If there is one thing a new Prime Minister can do, it’s bring about hope. It’s bring about a sense of direction, of momentum in its best sense to re-energise all of us. The inertia that exists at the moment throughout the systems that I come across, is palpable…We can change things for the better.
…
“Here is the difficult bit. And you won’t like it. I believe that there has to be a complete transformation of the welfare state.I don’t believe it’s right to give people money to stay at home. I don’t think it helps those with mental health problems, to say, instead of we’re going to actually work with you to connect you to a voluntary placement or a training place or the beginnings of a job, even if it’s only part time, and we’re going to put the money behind you to do it, instead we’re going to pay you to stay at home… 

“Now I’m not saying because I could do it, other people can do it in the same way. I keep nipping myself and remembering what it was like, and what a struggle it was and how after my dad was killed in a workplace accident when I was 12, my mum had the most incredible struggle and needed support that she didn’t get. So where it’s needed we have to give it…I do sincerely believe we need a hand up not a hand out.”

Chair of the Social Mobility Commission, Alun Francis OBE, said in his speech:

“Our focus is on young people who are NEET, particularly those who are using the welfare system. It’s an issue that’s being widely discussed and debated at the moment but it has not, until now, had sufficient attention from social mobility policymakers and campaigners. 

“Social mobility debates have been focussed far too much on long upward mobility, from the bottom to the top. At the Commission we are not convinced that this is our biggest social mobility challenge. But it has tended to pre-occupy the social mobility world that has focussed very much on young people with high educational attainment and their pathways into elite occupations.

“I think we are going to have a debate in this country, if we aren’t already starting to have it, about the economic model which this version of social mobility feeds, because it’s one in which London, and its concentration of financial and professional services, has increasingly become the main breadwinner for the country…But the rest of the country has not done equally well – in fact much of it has done quite badly. And in many places, it just feels like it is getting worse.”

Our expert panels identified obstacles and solutions across: 

• Pathways to sustained education or employment across Further Education, apprenticeships, Technical and Vocational levels and how to assess their effectivenes
• Place-based approaches to support young people into work or education and the vital role local authorities can play.
• Welfare policies across Universal Credit, conditionality and sanctions, and how they influence pathways into work or education.
• Barriers for economically inactive NEETs, which is currently around 60% of NEETs, and how these barriers can be removed. 

Catch up on the day

Full recordings of the speeches are available here. 

You can see highlights from the day on our social media channels: X, LinkedIn, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram.  

To make sure you don’t miss out on future events and research updates from the Social Mobility Commission, subscribe to our email newsletter here 

Special thanks to… 

All of our guests, panelists and speakers who joined us on the day: 

• Angela Rayner – MP for Ashton-under-Lyne, previous Deputy Prime Minister, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government and Deputy Labour Leader  
• Helen Whateley – MP for Faversham and Mid Kent and Shadow Minister for Work and Pensions
• Lord Blunkett – Former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Education and Home Office
• Nick Bent MBE – CEO, upReach
• Charlotte McGrath – CEO, Movement to Work
• Sharon Blyfield OBE – Head of Early Careers, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners GB
• Craig Beaumont OBE – Executive Director, Federation of Small Businesses
• Lauren Domfe – Founder of Bear the Brunt
• Baroness Stedman-Scott – Former Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department for Work and Pensions
• Anna Dawe – Principal & CEO, Wigan & Leigh College
• Nishi Mayor – Director of Employer Engagement & Partnerships, Youth Futures Foundation
• Paul O’Neill – Development Director, Steve Morgan Foundation
• Ryan Wain – Executive Director of Politics, Tony Blair Institute
• Dr Annie Irvine – Qualitative social researcher and Lecturer in Social Policy, University of York
• Robert Halfon – Executive Director, Make UK and Former Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships & HE
• Baz Ramaiah – Director for Policy & Research, Youth Employment UK
• Peter Swallow MP – Chair of the APPG on Social Mobility
• Naomi Clayton – CEO, Institute for Employment Studies
• Laura Savage – Partner Services and Social Value Solutions Director, People Plus
• Joanna Hofman – Director of Research and Evaluation, IPSOS
• Jean-Andre Prager – Director at Flint Global and a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange