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Alan Milburn has said “there is no such thing as a free lunch” as he warned the government’s mission to tackle the youth unemployment crisis will take ten years and billions of pounds.
The former health secretary is set to unveil his review of the so-called Neets – under-25s not in employment, education or training – on Tuesday, which is expected to recommend radical changes to reduce welfare dependency.
Mr Milburn has said some young people will receive less financial support under his proposals, and called for young people to have a “legal guarantee” of work, training or employment support.
He said it will take 10 years to get to a “reasonable level” of youth unemployment in the UK, and also said GPs should be the people who sign fit notes, calling them a “route into the welfare system”.
He told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg show: “We’ve got to change how the current amount of money is spent and yes, of course, there will be a need for additional investment and that will run into billions I think, over a 10-year period.
“But what you get back is you get welfare savings back, and then you get the so-called fiscal benefits of young people not being reliant on a benefit but being paid a wage.”
Asked how long it would take to get the benefits bill down, he said: “This is a 10-year plan and you just got to be candid with people about this.”
Asked what his response was to people who argue he could be much tougher, he said: “I say that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
“If you are going to will the ends, you’ve got to will the means. I don’t think there’s a single person in this country who believes that it’s tolerable to have one million young people aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training.”
He added it was not possible to “wave a magic wand” and do it within a few years without “crude cuts”.
“You can if you just do crude cuts, OK – if you do crude cuts, absolutely fine. But if you do crude cuts in benefits, all that happens is that young people show up somewhere else on the government ledger.”
He said: “It’s a 10-year programme for a reason because that’s the amount of time that we think it will take to get to a reasonable level of young people in this country being Neet.”
Work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden confirmed on Sunday that “there will be people in the future who will not get what they would get today”, as he urged Labour MPs to support the changes.
Asked whether he agreed that some people should lose the welfare they currently receive, Mr McFadden told the BBC’s Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg show: “There will be people in the future who will not get what they would get today.
“When people come up for reassessment, they go on to a new system but, as I say, people are reassessed today under the current system.”
Amid questions about whether government will be able to win the backing of its MPs over any changes it adopts, Mr McFadden argued ministers must make reforms not “in spite of being Labour people”, but “because we’re Labour people”.
“If you’re 20 right now and you sign on to long-term sickness benefits, you’ve got more chance of marking your 30th birthday and still being on them than having a steady job in between,” he said.
“And the reason we have to change that isn’t in spite of being Labour people, it’s because we are Labour people.”