There’s no epidemic of laziness. People desperately want to work - but here’s what’s holding them back
Creaking transport and sky-high childcare costs conspire to keep the young and not so young out of employment
Keir Starmer is about to be exposed, yet again, for a failure to think big. This week, Alan Milburn’s long-awaited report into why there are so many young people out of work and education will finally be published. He has already described to the press that he found a “system failure”, which leaves £25 spent on benefits supporting jobless youngsters for every £1 allocated to programmes to boost their chances of finding sustainable work.
Milburn, previously a cabinet minister in the Blair years and election advisor to Labour, praises the efforts Starmer has made this time round on education and health and the promise of a youth work guarantee. But his diagnosis will be damning: he says the support system for workers in early adulthood needs a complete reset.
The headlines will be dominated by a debate over what that “reset” should mean for welfare and benefits. There are some stark findings in the report, particularly around the link between disability benefit claims and long-term exclusion from work. Of those who claim a personal independence payment (PIP), for example, only one in four are in work by the age of 24. Being out of work in that crucial time period is known to be linked to lifelong worklessness.
The report also highlights that those who can and want to work (acknowledging some disabled claimants never will) could be put off getting stuck in because of the huge drops in income - up to £2,000 a month that can result when they transition into paid work. This is because there is a “cliff edge” where rising earnings mean entitlements slip away, even if a job is only temporary. Nobody would put themselves through forcible impoverishment. As the report will explain: “There is almost no intermediate step - no gradual build-up, no trial period that genuinely removes the fear of losing everything if a job does not work out.”
Those who say this is a failure of government policy are absolutely right, but this week you’ll sadly hear more noise from those who are wrong, with their diagnosis of a pandemic of laziness and a cultural tolerance of welfare dependency.
What’s not being discussed at all is how young people are the hardest hit by huge external barriers to employment, however hard they want to work. Take transport, for example.
In major cities like London this is easily overlooked, but for most areas of the country the lack of reliable, affordable transport is a huge infrastructure burden on working age people.
Car owners have higher levels of access to employment, but according to a parliamentary review of local transport published late last year, 22 per cent of households do not have access to a car: 40 per cent of those are low-income homes - the ones in most need of connectivity.
Lower skilled jobs themselves often require car access to out-of-town locations, but even the town centre roles are hard to reach when bus services have suffered route cuts of between 50 per cent and 80 per cent in less than 20 years.
Fifty-seven per cent of working-age people in England live in areas where it’s very hard to access a workplace within 45 minutes using public transport. Young people between 16 and 24 have the lowest car access among the population, and the cost of running one is rising weekly as geopolitical crises hit fuel costs at home. Meanwhile women and girls also reported they had not pursued some employment or training options due to safety of transport available to them. More than a third of women surveyed by the British Transport Police say they have been sexually harassed or abused on a train,
People do want to work. Lord Wolfson, the boss of Next, shared this week that his firm now receives 19 applications for every shop-floor opportunity, twice the number filed a handful of years ago. That’s not the sign of a nation that’s given up and taken a collective duvet decade. There are fewer jobs available, but people are clamouring. What if it’s not the welfare infrastructure that’s the biggest barrier to greater youth employment, but the way the rest of our infrastructure is failing too?
As you climb up the age brackets, new infrastructure problems arise. At the last election, both the Conservatives (still the official opposition, we must remember) and Labour committed to improve access to childcare by fully-funding 30 hours of term-time childcare per work for families with two parents in paid employment. But the funding provided has failed to keep up with the real costs of staffing nurseries effectively and the business costs of keeping them open in a cost of living crisis.
What happened next was entirely predictable: some smaller nursery settings closed, others ratcheted up their costs, often multiple times within the same year, putting huge pressure on already tight family budgets. Many have used “add on” costs to bridge the gap, which include payments for meals, nappies and other sundries are high prices. Some are now refusing to admit pre-school age children because the funding for that age group is lower, leaving parents with a year to cover between nursery and school age. Cheaper settings, including childminders, are also closing in record numbers.
Childcare is economic infrastructure. When the cost of working becomes too high, or childcare is too hard to find, it is impossible for two parents to sustain employment. Sky high rental payments (the average first-time buyer is now 34, and the average first-time mother is 29, so first children are often born into a private rented home) add to universal credit claims when two parents can no longer meet nursery fees.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has this week written to the Competition and Markets Authority asking them to investigate the fees that nurseries are charging parents. The government wants costs reduced for parents, but the only way it can do this is find more money of its own to subsidise at a higher rate. Parents feel connected to their childcare providers; they trust them with the most precious thing in their own lives every single day. Phillipson may soon find they are on the side of the struggling staff, fighting to keep settings open in an impossible situation where every cost they incur is rising.
Starmer’s announcement of a handful of summertime cost of living measures, including reduced cost family days out, were a nod to the challenges that young and mid-adult voters are facing. Yet it has a touch of Rishi Sunak’s covid-era ‘Eat Out to Help Out’ about it: it sounds great in a speech, but doesn’t make much difference (though it could make things worse for the government). Those policies touch everybody but speak to nobody. For those trying to find £1,700 a month in nursery fees for two children, a day out isn’t going to make a lot of difference. If you can’t afford to feed your children, you’re not spending money on a day at the zoo.
The crisis in employment might be pinching our young people the hardest but its fingers are on everyone’s skin. When there are 19 good quality applications for every single shop job, we are all suffering. Milburn’s report is a useful starting point for a conversation that needs to be much bigger. The “system reset” we need isn’t just about benefits, disability and job services, it’s the way our whole economy operates. Burnham needs a big vision to challenge Starmer - one that’s wide and deep enough to take in everything that’s stopping us working and living the way we deserve. ■
About the author: Hannah Fearn is a freelance journalist specialising in social affairs. She was comment editor of The Independent for seven years, and has previously worked for The Guardian, Times Higher Education and Inside Housing. She has a special interest in inequality, poverty, housing, education and life chances. Zoë Grünewald is away.
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