Keir Starmer has vowed to get young people working and off benefits by slashing welfare spending.
The Prime Minister is said to have admitted this week that the large number of people receiving the support is damaging as they may ‘struggle to get off’ it.
New figures showed there are now an additional one million people on universal credit since Labour took office.
Almost a million under-25s are not in either work, education or training but are instead dependent on state handouts.
Sir Keir told The Sun: ‘We must get them back into work.
‘Those that can should be in work, so everyone has that ability to get up, to earn to contribute and actually have the self-fulfillment and the self-respect that work gives so many people.
‘So we have to bear down on this to do more on welfare and I’m determined to do this.’
However the Labour leader twice declined to confirm whether the cuts would be in Rachel Reeves’s November budget.
Keir Starmer has vowed to get young people working and off benefits by slashing welfare spending (file image)
The Prime Minister has also said he hopes more young people will take up apprenticeships and that these may be on an equal footing with degrees – guaranteeing skilled work for many years to come.
This week it emerged Ms Reeves had suffered a fresh blow ahead of her Budget next month amid a larger-than-expected downgrade to official productivity forecasts.
The Chancellor is now increasingly likely to have to break Labour‘s manifesto pledge not to put up income tax, National Insurance or VAT, said experts.
It comes after the Office for Budget Responsibility, the fiscal watchdog, delivered a worse-than-expected cut to the UK’s productivity outlook ahead of next month’s Budget.
The Chancellor has already hit families and businesses with £40billion of tax increases and promised she would not come back for more.
But the latest leaked forecasts imply that the burden heaped on Britain could be even worse when she delivers her next Budget.
Rob Wood, chief UK economist at consultancy Pantheon Macroeconomics, said that meeting Budget rules to bring down borrowing and debt while also increasing the ‘headroom’ against these targets would mean ‘up to £50billion of tax rises and spending cuts’.
Even if there are some positive forecast changes ahead of the Budget that reduce this to £40billion, it would still ‘significantly raise the probability that the Chancellor resorts to a manifesto-breaking income tax hike’, Mr Wood said.
