Work and Pensions Committee
11 March 2026
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Work and Pensions Committee House of Commons
00:01 - 00:53
Speaker 1
Very warm welcome to the first session of our youth employment and education and training inquiry. And we're delighted to welcome members of different sectors this morning with us. We have Kate Nichols from UK Hospitality, Tim Balkham from the Construction Industry Training Board, Chris Russell from the Federation of Small Businesses, and Kate Shuesmith from the British Chambers of Commerce. So thank you so much, all of you, for coming along. I've got some questions for you, and I'm going to start.
So thinking about the change in the labor market, what would you see as the big changes that may be particularly affecting our young people? Thinking about now but also what we might see say over the next five years?
00:54 - 02:34
Speaker 2
Yes please do Kate. Yeah. Thank you. So I can start from the perspective of just yesterday we published our latest quarterly economic forecast and we managed to factor in what's happening in Iran, which has had an impact in terms of our predictions for inflation over the course So of the we're expecting that path to not go back to the 2% as quickly as we did previously and to stay elevated for the rest of this year. But the other part of that was that there was a knock on impact on unemployment and we're at the higher end of a forecast on unemployment.
So we're predicting it to reach 5.5% by the end of this year and actually probably think that if circumstances continue across the board, not just in The Middle East, then that could be an underestimate of where we actually end up. And one of the most concerning features of that is disproportionately young people are often impacted by unemployment rates. We can see that across the board businesses are trying their level best to stay afloat right now is probably how best to put it. So whilst just under half of all businesses tell us that they, they expect and would want to grow over the coming year, they are concerned that they cannot do that. And when we look at growth, which is probably the defining mission of an agenda of our time, it's the thing that businesses share most with policymakers.
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