NOW I’m no benefits-basher. When I was a single teen mum without a penny to my name, the benefits system was truly a lifeline.
A temporary one that tided me over until I found work, and then I never looked back.
For every £25 the Government spends keeping young people on benefits, it spends just £1 helping them into work Credit: AFP
Alan Milburn, who served as Health Secretary under Tony Blair, is set to publish a report on why nearly a million young people are ‘NEET’, warning the system needs a ‘total overhaul’ Credit: Alamy
But getting off and into work has now become a pipe dream for too many young people.
This week, Alan Milburn, the former minister commissioned by the Government to find out why nearly a million young people are NEET (not in education, or training), will deliver his verdict on .
We already know the thrust of what he will say, thanks to various leaks, which is that it is a shameful system that needs a total overhaul. And he is right.
For every £25 the Government spends keeping young people on benefits, .
The number of NEETs is now so large it could fill Stadium ten times over. And it is still growing.
Milburn wants a complete system reset.
Labour, he says, must .
But here is what the Government does not want to say out loud: getting young people off benefits is only half the battle.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves has added to the issues, with employers also facing higher costs after National Insurance was raised to 15 per cent and the payment threshold cut to £5,000 per employee Credit: Alamy
Things are only set to get worse for the young people, as The boss of Next, Lord Wolfson, warned this week of a ‘dramatic fall’ in entry-level jobs. Credit: PA:Press Association
The other half is making it possible for businesses to actually hire them.
Right now, this Government is failing spectacularly on both counts.
The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has done the maths, and the numbers are genuinely scandalous.
Once housing benefit and personal independent payments (PIP) are factored in, .
On this reckoning, one in four full-time workers in Britain (six million people) would actually be better off financially if they packed in their job tomorrow and went on benefits instead. It is completely farcical.
And while all of this is going on, employers are getting hammered.
and the threshold at which they start paying it was slashed to just £5,000 per employee.
And that was after the CSJ found the previous year.
The moment a small takes on a young person and pays them anything decent, the Government helps itself to a very generous slice.
For the kind of small employer who would once have given a teenager their first break, and is already operating on tight profit margins, hiring has simply become bad for business.
It’s idiotic policy-making.
And here is something else that should set alarm bells ringing.
It is not just who are wasting away on benefits.
The CSJ also found more than 700,000 university graduates are currently out of work and claiming .
Young people who did everything they were told: went to university, got the degree. Even they cannot get a foot in the door.
Things are only set to get worse. The boss of Next, Lord Wolfson, warned this week of a “dramatic fall” in entry-level jobs.
He says the number of applications his company receives has doubled.
Where I work, it’s not uncommon to get 500 applications in for a single junior role, and often from overqualified youngsters.
Although young people have taken a battering — being called lazy, work-shy and entitled — I want to stick up for them.
I don’t think the problem is a shortage of young people who want to work.
They are desperate for a pay packet.
The real shortage is of incentives for businesses to hire them.
But, to make it worse, the new is full of measures that will kill off the few incentives left.
One moronic new rule could mean that if an employer offers extra hours here and there, they may have to guarantee those hours in a contract going forward.
So what happens? They stop offering the extra hours. The workers who wanted them and needed the income lose out.
When will this Government realise that businesses are not the enemy?
Speak to any employer and they will tell you they want to hire. It’s in their interest to invest in young people.
But soaring National Insurance bills, a botch-job of an Employment Rights Act, and a benefits system that makes staying home more lucrative than showing up have made that almost impossible.
The benefits bill is already out of control. In the last financial year, the welfare bill hit £333billion, more than the entire amount the Treasury raised in .
in six months’ time, one thing is non-negotiable: smashing that one- million NEET figure has to be the number one priority.
And the Government can’t do it without being unashamedly pro-business.
If Labour fail to do this, they’ll be remembered as the party that trapped a million young people in a life on the dole.
Eze Chidiebere Paul
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