Sana Kardar
For decades, youth unemployment has been discussed principally as a labour-market statistic: something to reduce, monitor and periodically lament. Yet behind every percentage point lies a far more consequential question about Britain’s economic future.
When a young person remains outside employment, education or training, the loss is not theirs alone. Skills remain undeveloped, earning potential is diminished, confidence can decline and productive capacity that could have strengthened the wider economy is left unrealised.
Against this backdrop, the Government’s renewed emphasis on young people represents a welcome step. The expansion of employment support, including the Jobs Guarantee, apprenticeships and incentives for employers to recruit young people, reflects an important shift in philosophy: intervention should begin before temporary disadvantage hardens into long-term economic exclusion.
The urgency is difficult to ignore. Nearly one million young people in the UK are currently not in education, employment or training. Measures designed to create opportunities for those struggling to enter the workplace also begin to confront one of the labour market’s enduring paradoxes: young people are routinely expected to possess experience before anyone has given them the opportunity to acquire it.
Employment, however, should be the beginning of our ambition, not its conclusion. A first job creates considerably more than a wage. It develops professional judgement, confidence, networks, discipline and transferable skills. It establishes foundations upon which future opportunities and careers can be built.
Seen through this lens, investment in youth employment is not simply public expenditure designed to reduce unemployment. It is investment in human capital whose economic and social returns can accumulate across an entire working life.
Fair pay belongs within the same argument. Young workers should be able to see employment as a genuine route towards independence, security and progression. The challenge for government is not simply to choose between higher wages and more jobs, but to develop policies capable of advancing both.
Recruitment incentives, high-quality apprenticeships and sustained investment in skills can help employers take a chance on those at the beginning of their careers while ensuring young people have realistic prospects of progressing towards better-paid and more secure employment.
The next step must be to connect these opportunities with the economy Britain is attempting to build.
Life sciences, engineering, artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and clean energy will require more than investment and infrastructure. They will require people with the knowledge, confidence and technical skills to sustain them. Youth employment policy should therefore not sit at the margins of economic strategy; it should be one of its foundations.
Perhaps the most important change must be conceptual. Young people should not primarily be regarded as a challenge for the welfare system to manage. They should be recognised as economic, creative and intellectual capacity waiting to be developed.
Government initiatives can provide an important foundation, but their lasting significance will depend upon whether Britain can turn opportunity into a pathway: from education and training to employment, from employment to progression, and from a first pay cheque to genuine economic independence.
A country that invests in the potential of its young people is doing more than helping them enter the economy.
It is deciding what kind of economy, and what kind of Britain, it intends to leave in their hands.
