The House | Jacqui Smith: “A Million Young People Not Earning Or Learning Is A Moral Outrage”

Photography by Louise Haywood-Schiefer

10 min read22 min

Jacqui Smith was the first serving minister to use the past tense when talking on the record about Keir Starmer’s premiership. “I would have been very happy for him to continue,” she said on that Monday morning before the podium appeared outside No 10. It was the final confirmation, if any were needed, that the Prime Minister would soon be confirming he was on his way out.

This is far from the first time Baroness Smith of Malvern, 63, has borne witness to serious political turbulence. Having first been elected to Parliament in Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide, it fell to her as his chief whip in 2006 to tell the prime minister he had a problem: the party’s demands for a ‘timetable’ were growing.

Sitting down with The House hours before Andy Burnham’s Makerfield victory, the education minister – now forming part of a Labour government from the House of Lords – reflects on this familiar territory.

“I’m now in my 12th year as a minister,” she says, adding up time served under both New Labour and Starmer. “I’ve been around the block a bit, and I have seen turbulence. I understand that governments go through difficult times.

“In those cases, usually the best thing to do is to focus on the change that brought you both into politics and into government, to get on with delivering it, and to spend less time worrying about the personalities involved.”

Perhaps unrealistic but not surprising from a minister described first and foremost as “loyal” by those who have worked with her over the years. She was immediately appointed as Gordon Brown’s home secretary when he took office, for example, despite having been labelled as one of “Blair’s babes”.

Asked what she makes of the recent intervention by her former boss, she shoots back: “Which one of my former bosses?” Tony Blair inspired a summer of essays when in May he published a 5,000-word thesis offering advice to the party he once led.

“Tony’s interventions are always welcome from me. He is, and was, both a phenomenal boss and an era-defining prime minister. But… this is probably a time to buckle down, get on with changing the country and spend less time writing essays.”

Smith left government in 2009 amid the expenses scandal, which included the revelation that she had – in error, she said – claimed back money for two pornographic films bought by her (now former) husband. “I had some high-profile problems in the last government, both personally and politically,” Smith admits at one point, unprompted.

In 2010, she lost her Commons seat to the Conservatives but went on to rebuild her reputation outside the Palace walls, co-hosting a weekly LBC show and – following a path well-trodden by former politicians – competing in Strictly Come Dancing in 2020.

When Smith became skills minister in July 2024, she was returning to the department where her ministerial career first began back in 1999. 

She recalls bringing her sons with her, who were tiny at the time, and how the glass-walled offices were a playground of sorts for them. Her boys are now more than six feet tall.

Much has changed over the decades, not least the lives of young people like Smith’s sons. The recently published review of another former New Labour minister, Alan Milburn, exposes the depth of the crisis of Britain’s almost one million young people not in education, employment or training. If these “Neets” were to form a city, he writes, it would be larger than Leeds, Glasgow or Cardiff.

“The fact that we’ve now got a million young people who are not earning or learning is a moral outrage and it’s also an enormous waste of economic talent,” says Smith.

The report observes that the rise of AI is likely to create further pressure at the bottom end of the labour market. What is this government’s plan to protect young people from the harms of the AI revolution?

Smith points to the work of the government’s ‘AI alliance’ and ‘AI champions’ who are looking at entry-level jobs and identifying “where those challenges might be and what more we need to do in order to support young people into them”.

“If you hollow out your entry-level jobs in any area of employment, you’re building up problems for the future, because then you don’t have the pipeline that you need,” she says, adding that this is something employers “get”.

Does it worry her that companies are cutting jobs for young people because of AI? While Smith is careful to point out that there are a range of factors contributing to the changing labour market, she adds: “I know it worries young people, because I talk to them about it…

“That’s why it’s quite important for us to keep saying: whatever the challenge is, your opportunities are likely to be better if you’ve been able to go through high-quality courses, whether higher education, apprenticeships, or other skills routes.”

The Neet generation is also, Milburn highlights, generally unhappy. “Young people lead complicated lives,” Smith says. “There is a lot going on in the world with which they have to put up.”

She takes the opportunity to lay the blame at the door of her predecessors: there is less for young people to do and enjoy, she claims, “partly because of the way that some of the things that we previously put around education got hollowed out by the last government”.

When Labour took power in 2024, it was braced for a host of problems. One of those it did not anticipate, or perhaps want to deal with, was the financial crisis inherited in the university sector.

Universities have often found themselves on the front lines since 2024. The proposal of a levy on international students in the immigration white paper blindsided the sector, although sources stress that the alternatives available were far worse.

The narrative that some universities run courses that offer no benefits to their students is also one that has permeated all major parties. At Labour conference in 2025, Starmer announced that the party’s old ambition for half of young people to go to university was being decisively abandoned – “I don’t think that’s right for our times,” he declared – and the government sought to push apprenticeships and other vocational courses.

“I’ve been around the block a bit, and I have seen turbulence. I understand that governments go through difficult times”

The question of apprenticeships versus universities is one that has played out in many governments, and Smith finds herself jostling with a higher education (HE) sector that often questions whether she even likes them. Smith, of course, would contest this characterisation of her approach.

Whitehall has reportedly considered introducing new national minimum standards, such as a pass in GCSE English, to access student loans – a move that would lock some people out of the opportunity to enrol in higher education. Smith refuses to comment directly on the reports but says she wants those accessing higher education to “genuinely benefit from it”.

She also stands by decisions not to tackle the Plan 2 student loan system, taking the party line that there are other priorities within government that had to take precedent. She insists, however, that she has been “continuing to think about what more we can do to make that system of repayment better and fairer for those who are in it”.

Another high-profile story in the HE sector has been the debate around free speech. In April, the University of Sussex won a case against the regulator Office for Students (OfS) in the High Court, overturning a £585,000 fine handed down last year for failing to uphold free speech. Among other things, the judge found that the OfS decision to issue the fine was biased against Sussex.

Two months later, Smith is adamant that she supports the OfS and its operation. She is also clear universities should not interpret the ruling as a sign all is well on the free speech front: “It’s important that that court case isn’t seen as a suggestion that there is nothing that universities need to be thinking about when it comes to freedom of speech.”

When The House speaks to Smith, Starmer has not yet resigned but Labour MPs are already contemplating life under Andy Burnham’s leadership.

“I sat in the cabinet with Andy Burnham,” the minister says. “I’ve known Andy for a long time. I know what a talented politician he is. He’s been on a journey, and I’m glad he’s coming back to Westminster.” She does not approve of him instigating a leadership change, however.

While numerous names have been thrown around as potential successors to Starmer in recent months, none of those considered frontrunners have been women. Infamously, Labour is yet to elect a female leader. Is Smith, the first female home secretary and currently an equalities minister, embarrassed by that?

“No, I’m not embarrassed,” she claims. “We’ve got an enormously strong team, of which, frankly, quite a lot of the best performers are women.”

Many of her female colleagues in the party are embarrassed, and were furious about the Peter Mandelson revelations, which some said typified a deep-rooted misogyny in Labour. Does she believe Starmer did enough to tackle the so-called ‘boys’ club’ in No 10?

Smith pauses before answering. “I don’t think, while we’ve got the sorts of inequality that we have across society and in politics, anybody’s ever taken enough action. A lot of my political life, and one of the elements of my role now, is about how we tackle that in politics. I’ve been around long enough to see quite a lot of improvements in the way that women are treated in politics, but there’s still more that needs to change.”

Predictably, she is clearer when it comes to Reform UK’s shortcomings on women’s rights. Nigel Farage’s party has explicitly pledged to repeal the Equality Act 2010 on “day one”, which Smith says “scares” her.

“It would be a massively backward step but I’m afraid it sums up the approach of Reform, which is to identify a problem and decide who’s to blame for it, rather than to identify a problem and think about how you solve it.”

Does she think working in politics as a woman has become easier over the last two decades? It’s a question Smith seems keen to reflect on: “There are more women in Parliament, far more than when I was first elected in 1997… There are more women doing a wide range of jobs. Those are all really important developments.

“But what I also note is, I had some high-profile jobs in the last government, [but] both personally and politically, I never faced the level of abuse and intimidation that politicians face now, and in the week when we’re remembering…” she breaks off.

“Sorry,” she says, pausing to gather herself. “When we’re remembering the death of Jo Cox, who was a good friend of mine… that is something that worries me about the environment in which, all politicians actually – but the evidence suggests particularly women  and particularly women of colour – now have to try and operate in the public sphere and in elected democracy.

“There are women who think twice about coming into a political career,” Smith continues, “and that’s a terrible loss of their talent – but it’s an undermining of our democracy as well.”