This week saw the Conservative Party Conference take place in Manchester, and with the General Election due by January 2025, it provided an opportunity to see what their vision is for the future of the UK.

While much of the debate centred around the cancelling of the UK’s flagship transport Levelling Up project, HS2 - the economic and labour market challenges of the last 18 months also loomed large.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt confirmed that the National Living Wage is set to be raised to at least £11 an hour from next April – a move which could benefit two million of the lowest paid workers. While this is positive, Hunt’s vow to increase sanctions further to ensure “fairness” in the benefits system – a commitment echoed by the Prime Minister himself – represents an extremely unhelpful return to more punitive rhetoric and measures aimed at those in receipt of welfare support.

Fundamentally, pushing people into ‘any job’ will not alleviate the worker shortages that some sectors are facing but is much more likely to further heighten stress and anxiety for already vulnerable people. Evidence from the Department for Work and Pensions itself not only suggests that sanctions are ineffective, but simultaneously showed that they slow people’s progress back into work too.

Judged against the theme of the Prime Minister’s speech to Conference – to take ‘long term decisions for a brighter future’ – this approach is destined to fail.

The emphasis must instead be on introducing more tailored employment support for jobseekers with different needs, as well as a greater focus on improving both job quality and security.

In this spirit, across the series of events I participated in at Conference I sought to emphasise the importance tackling severely insecure work. After all, our research has shown those with long term health conditions and those with caring responsibilities – two of the groups driving current levels of economic inactivity – are disproportionately more likely to end up in jobs which are poorly paid, on unstable contractual terms or lacking in access to employment rights and protections.

That’s because these groups very often find themselves having to trade job security for the flexibility they require to simply be able to work at all, despite strong evidence suggesting that being in this kind of work can be just as bad for your health and employment prospects as being unemployed.

It’s vital that we provide people in this situation who have fallen out of the labour market with both the confidence and security they require that finding a job will not lead them into further precarity and financial insecurity.

Investments in skills, employment support and widening access to childcare support will all be critical. But so will strengthening the law to eradicate more pernicious forms of employment, as well as a renewed drive to work with employers to increase the quality of jobs on offer and embed flexibility into already secure jobs.

The Conservatives themselves have long recognised these ambitions. It was a Conservative Government that commissioned the Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices in 2017 and committed to take its findings forward. It was also a Conservative Government that put improving employment quality and living standards at the heart of the Levelling Up White Paper in February last year.

Yet, unfortunately, the reality is that only a tiny proportion of these ambitions have been delivered in this Parliament. Whilst we may be a year or more away from the next General Election, the Government should not simply cede this agenda to Labour.

Rather than focussing on the failed approach of further tightening welfare sanctions, the Government should look to reclaim the initiative on improving work, drive as much progress as possible in this Parliament and commit to taking it a step further in the next. Only then will they deliver on their Levelling Up ambitions and tackle the economic inactivity challenge.

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