Conservative commitments - 18, 17 fails

Replacing Jobseeker's Allowance for 18-21 year-olds with a Youth Allowance time-limited to six months. After that, they will have to take an apprenticeship or traineeship or do community work to claim benefits

This is one of the more outrageous sets of policies that the Conservatives are trumpeting. If we enslave someone we can claim he’s no longer unemployed, but it’s not something to be proud of. Conservative policy seems to be aimed more at taking advantage of young people than helping them. This policy is intended to be a major part of this aspiration: ‘We will aim to abolish long-term youth unemployment’ (from the manifesto pg 18).

Firstly, the unemployment figures are widely known to be inaccurate. There is gaming of the system by contractors such as by sending people off for training on the one day a month that the unemployment census is taken. But even without this ‘legal dishonesty’, there’s the problem of underemployment. Surveys show that many people in part-time work, temporary work or who are self-employed actually want full-time jobs. For example, zero-hours contracts can give people only a few hours of work a week, but even if a person gets zero hours he still counts as employed.

The second aspect of underemployment is that we have many people over-qualified for the jobs they are doing. For example, a worker with a master’s degree working on the tills at the supermarket is underemployed.

If we include estimates for these problems, youth unemployment is at record highs.

That’s just the background. The main help referred to by Conservative policy is ‘We have abolished the jobs tax – employers' National Insurance contributions (NICs) – for the under 21s’. This might help, but as NICs are a minor cost of employment, probably not a major issue. Additionally, youth underemployment stretches beyond 21 year-olds. However, there must be some give and take: ‘it is not fair …that 18-21 year-olds … should slip straight into a life on benefits without first contributing to their community’.

If you don’t let them get a job and contribute, it’s hardly fair to blame them for not contributing. This statement demonstrates a shocking lack of understanding of the situation of many poor and young people. Benefits are required at the beginning and end of people’s lives. We don’t scrap all post-natal care because babies haven’t contributed anything to society; we understand that they probably will but aren’t yet able to. Blaming the poor for being poor ignores a lot of factors they can’t control at the best of times, but blaming people who haven’t had a chance to contribute for not taking that chance is unacceptable.

Benefits aren’t something that people earn; they exist specifically for the people who are not earning. If they were merely a safety net for those who have been earning, we might as well scrap them and expect people to save their money themselves. I know some Conservatives might approve of that. If we do want to scrap benefits and leave the poor to die in squalor, we should do so for all the poor. Discriminating against young people specifically is forbidden in law. Perhaps we should prosecute the Conservative party for discriminating by age.

I don’t know the rules about which young people can claim jobseekers’ allowance, but ONS data show 729,000 unemployed people aged 18-24, of whom 261,000 are full-time students. This compares to 3.87 million in work. Similarly, 3.2 million were in full-time education, 3 million employed and only 468,000 of the remainder unemployed. Unemployment rates don’t tell the whole story, though. Even if large numbers of young people were unemployed (and government figures might well be wrong) it wouldn’t necessarily mean that they are lazy people who need fewer benefits. It might mean that there are no jobs. It is very common for junior roles to go first when companies shrink, or for last-in, first-out rules to be introduced. People cut back on training and support, as long-term investments, when times are tight. This means that a whole generation of youngsters will miss out on the personal development given to people still in work, and it seems somewhat harsh to penalize them further.

I can’t be bothered to calculate the cost of the NIC reduction for those in work, the ‘savings’ of lower benefits from a ‘youth allowance’, the personal cost of lower wages from enforced apprenticeships, or the value of the free labour from enforcing community service. The basic point remains that these are all reducing the life quality of young people and creating savings for businesses or for government, with no coherent justification for treating young adults differently from older ones.