Eddie Barnes: The 'hope graveyard' of young people's opportunities is a national shame

Former health secretary Alan Milburn will this week publish his full report into Young People and Work. Picture: Jeff Moore/Press Association

As a father of teenagers and twenty-somethings, I find myself dwelling more than ever these days on the life chances of the country’s younger generation. I confess I carry some of the knee-jerk cynicism of people of my age, that ill-judged tendency to declare that this lot simply aren’t ready for the hard knocks and the long hours of work I recall from my own remembered youth.

Mostly though, once I’ve laid that cynicism aside and, more pertinently, once I’ve spent time listening to today’s young people talk about their prospects, another emotion comes to the fore. One of shame.

Shame, for example, when I chatted to a graduate in Glasgow last week as she told me how not a single job application she’s written since leaving university over a year ago had even been replied to, never mind rejected. Or when my son told me about a close friend who has packed up looking for a new job because it’s more cost-effective to stay on benefits. Or when I spoke to another twenty five year old earlier this month who (like most of her generation) is living with her parents, and who just laughed at me when I asked whether she was saving for a house.

John Loughton, the chief executive of Young Scot, describes job hunting for young people these days as a “hope graveyard”. The statistics bear the anecdotes out. Among 16-24 year olds, nearly one in six is now unemployed. It’s leading to something corrosive entering the bloodstream of young people growing up in the 2020s – a growing sense of fatalism about the world around them.

Nothing is going to get better, they reason, so why bother taking part? And who can blame them? Anna Millar, a politics student at the University of Glasgow, where I work, put it succinctly: “For many of us, the problem is no longer how to grow up. It’s whether we can afford to at all.” As I say, it’s a matter of national shame for all of us.

This is the backdrop to this week’s long-awaited and much-trailed report by former UK health secretary Alan Milburn into the problem of our “NEET” generation – those young people not in education, employment, or training. Scandalously, there are now one million 16-24 year olds languishing in this state. That’s one million young people, at the very moment when life should be opening up with possibility, instead waiting for life to begin. The publication of Mr Milburn’s report setting out a plan to combat this social cancer is, I’d suggest, way more significant than Chancellor John Healey’s already forgotten budget two weeks ago. And it’s not just an opportunity to restore some hope to young people who increasingly lack it. It’s a fundamental test of whether the state and politics more generally is still up to the job of delivering solutions.

Mr Milburn’s plan this week will essentially call for the way we deal with youth unemployment to be ripped up. He notes that, as things stands, we spend £25 on benefits for every £1 that is dedicated to employment support. In interviews last week, he made it clear his report will seek to change that balance. It will mean cuts to the benefits for some young people currently receive. The savings, he proposes, will be spent on employment advisors, mental health support, internships and job subsidies.

Mr Milburn has been blunt: “Candidly, it could mean that some people will get less financial support at the beginning of their benefit claim than under the current

system. But actually, for young people, there’s a different debate that we’ve got to resolve, which is whether the priority is their longer-term life chances or just their immediate shorter-term finances.”

Inevitably this will cause a stink – with Green politicians and the Labour left set to oppose any cuts to young people’s welfare. But, as Mr Milburn rightly notes, to continue down this road is simply to persevere with everything most of us hate about our political system, where symptoms, not causes are dealt with. In the jargon it’s known as “failure demand”, where all government does is spend cash mopping up and mitigating the problems it and wider society has created, rather than dealing with the problem at source.

Mr Milburn intends this week to confront this culture with a long-term solution that probably won’t start bearing fruit for years down the line. And

in doing so, it will serve up a challenge to the entire political system. Are politicians – are we all – prepared to accept the idea of deferred reward? Of something more than a short-term piece of sticking plaster?

And it’s a challenge to us, too. We often bemoan as a society why it is that Britain, and Scotland with it, seems so utterly dysfunctional. Why nothing ever bloody works.

Why the state seems so fundamentally broken. A core reason why that feels true is because a decade of political instability and here-today-gone-tomorrow political leaders have neglected to take the tough long-term calls that are necessary for future success. Britain has suffered from a leadership vacuum.

Mr Milburn’s report this week will ask us all – from Andy Burnham, to Kemi Badenoch, to John Swinney – a serious question: Will you put the long-term interest first? Will you listen to the evidence and engage in making change happen? Are you serious?

Ending the failure to provide a million young people with a start in life will be difficult and it will require short-term pain to get there. But, if we’re really to help Britain’s lost generation find a foothold in society, it needs to happen.