Angela Rayner tells Year 9s ‘do not surrender’ – as they provide recommendation to the PM

Angela Rayner has met with teenagers campaigning for change for the Mirror’s special project that asks Year 9s what they’d do if they were in No10.

Youngsters aged 14 and 15 set out their demands at an event hosted by this newspaper at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool. They took inspiration from Ms Rayner, who grew up on a council estate and now is the second most powerful person in the country as Deputy Prime Minister.

The Labour minister told the young people it was a “pleasure” to meet them as she admitted “the pressures on young people today are really different”. Ms Rayner praised the work they were doing in raising issues young people are facing and told them: “Your voice pushing it really helps drive it through so well done for everything you’re doing. Keep pushing and you’ll get there. Sometimes the hardest things, the things you have to work hardest on are the best. Don’t give up.”

Our project, ‘Year 9 in No 10’ asked them what the “austerity generation” would do if they were the Prime Minister – and heard a range of inspiring answers. At Sunday’s panel the Mirror’s Ros Wynne-Jones and Kevin Maguire were joined by housing campaigner Kwajo Tweneboa and Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, as well as five Year 9s who took to the stage to call for change.

Kwajo said he was “genuinely inspired” by their calls for action and emphasised the need to centre young voices. The campaigner, who is himself an inspiration to teens after he began raising issues on housing from a young age, said: “How can politics claim to be truly representative of a nation if we are ignoring the voices of young people? The answer to that is that it can’t truly be representative and that is why it’s so important to hear your stories.”

After 14 years of Tory rule and seeing public services run down, communities neglected and climate pledges abandoned, the Year 9s laid out their concerns including access to sport and mental health services, the housing crisis and Partygate.

Divine Mbaloula, 14, from North London, told the event about living in a home with damp and mould and the impact on her disabled brother Axel who has learning disabilities and severe epilepsy. “It’s not only me who is going through this,” she said. “There are hundreds of other people throughout Great Britain who are going through this as well and I want to be the voice for them so their housing crisis can be solved. I want to be the voice for everyone with housing problems and that’s why I want to be an architect so that I can make better houses for everyone.”

Erin Twigge, 14, from Leigh near Wigan, who lost her Nan and was forced to live away from her Dad when he isolated during the Covid pandemic, riled against Partygate. Speaking about her Nan, she said: “I wasn’t able to be with her in her final moments and it affected my whole family, as she was a wonderful woman. Everyone who knew her knew that she just lit up a room wherever she was. To find out that previous MPs weren’t following the restrictions that they put in place was devastating for my family and for families all across the UK.”

She added: “If Parliament says that the youth and the young don’t know what they’re talking about, us five today have proven that we can and we’ve proven that if we believe in something, and if we think that we can change something, we will.”

Yayha Suleman, 14, from Cardiff, who spends his time boxing, wants better access to sports for kids so they’re not forced to “waste their life behind a screen”. Speaking about his friends, he said: “They wanted to do sports but they couldn’t because they couldn’t afford it and their parents couldn’t pay for it. They had problems with their parents at home and they wanted to just do other things and they couldn’t do it… I want everyone to have equal opportunity.”

Summer McGough, 15, from Wishaw, Lanarks, is fighting for free travel for young people, like they have in Scotland. She said she saw a huge impact on her friends’ lives when the country scrapped the £2.25 bus fee for young people. “A lot of my friends, they’d be able to go out more… their parents were letting them out because they didn’t need to pay for buses,” she said.

“They can give them that £2.25 to go get an ice cream or go get a can of juice, something like that. I’ve seen how much of an impact that’s made in Scotland – being able to do more of what you love, being able to go to after school clubs, being able to go see grandparents.”

Inaaya Ijaz, 14, from Redbridge, who is the Deputy Leader of Redbridge Youth Parliament and Chief Voice Officer for Kids Against Plastic, raised the issue of climate change as well as called for votes for 16-year-olds. “I believe that young people aren’t well represented enough,” she said. “We are often stereotyped as not knowing enough to have a say. However this is far from the truth. Just because we are young, it does not mean that we don’t know how to shape the future that is better for the entire world. We are the generation which will inherit this world.”

Labour MP Ms Leadbeater said she felt “totally moved” and “totally inspired” by all their stories. She said the murder of her sister, the Labour MP Jo Cox, in 2016 took her on a political journey and made her realise “everything is political” and that “politics is about people”. Speaking about the concerns raised by the young people, she said: “Every single one of those issues is a political issue and it’s impacting people’s day to day lives. The fact we have young people engaging on these issues is so, so important – and it is our job to listen to you.”