Andy Burnham (centre-right) and Pat McFadden (centre) meet some young people during a visit to Alstom Transport in Derby on Tuesday. Photograph: Temilade Adelaja/PA View image in fullscreen Andy Burnham (centre-right) and Pat McFadden (centre) meet some young people during a visit to Alstom Transport in Derby on Tuesday. Photograph: Temilade Adelaja/PA Apprenticeships 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
Prefer the Guardian on Google 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 otherwis…