Will Darling Help Young People Off the Scrapheap?

So the Budget is out and Alistair Darling has announced Labour’s plans to get us out of the financial mess this country has got into. Included in this is a £3bn jobs package to help young people get into work so that they are not “abandoned to a future on the scrapheap”.

Unemployment is due to top 3 million by the end of the year and young people lacking experience and training are facing a future of doom. Whilst some people see living off benefits as an easy life, the reality is not quite so rosy. Living off around £45 a week is a hard task for even the most frugal and although housing benefits can help, they are not available to all. For most young people living at home, they do not feature but instead, put a pressure on their parents to keep providing when they too are facing a future of financial insecurity.

Being employed is not just about money. Going out to work gives people a sense of purpose. Without it, life can be very dull indeed, especially when you don’t have any money to do anything with. Looking for work means filling out application after application and in this current climate, it can mean facing rejection after rejection. Alongside no social life, this can lead to people losing confidence and feeling depressed and for young people, stuck in a vicious circle of not being able to get a job without experience and not being able to get experience without a job, it can seem like a daunting task and a bleak future. Their sense of excitement at being able to get a job and earn money becomes replaced with disillusionment and low self-esteem. In some cases, it becomes replaced by a life of crime. If we thought this country had problems with its youth before, then I dread to think what might happen in the future.

Darling’s plans are to offer recruitment subsidies to companies taking on 18-24 year olds who have been out of work for more than 12 months. Employers would receive a 20 per cent payment up-front and receive the remaining amount only when the worker was “settled”. Altogether, the government hope to create more than 250,000 jobs over the next two years.

This is all very well and good but where the 250,000 jobs are going to come from and how they are going to finance this idea when Darling’s last welfare-to-work project had to be rescued by a cash handout, I have no idea. But the thought is there and the fact that young people’s futures are being considered at all can only be a good thing.

Having worked with long-term young unemployed people, I have seen the affects of being out of work and how they deal with that. However, I have also seen how getting a job after such a long time can also prove difficult. After months of doing nothing and feeling very low, moving into a work environment where they need to learn new skills fast can be daunting and dealing with the pressures can feel extremely hard when your confidence levels are at rock bottom. All of these issues can be helped by a couple of sessions of coaching and in order to ensure that these young people do become “settled” in their work, the government would do well to invest in some coaches. The cost of coaching compared to the cost of having to re-recruit for the positions of those who cannot cope with the work environment is minimal. And for those that have given up their search being unable to deal with the rejections, it would help them to build their confidence and regain their aspirations.

We need to inspire the youth of this country because they will one day be running it. It's a lovely idea to say that all young people will be given either a job or a training position in the next couple of years but I'm not sure how the reality of that will work - hopefully well, but to really ensure that the scheme works, inspire them first and reignite their motivation. It's no use pushing someone on a training course they don't want to do or putting them in jobs they can't cope with. Build their confidence and raise their aspirations first so that they want to do well and can cope with whatever is thrown at them. Otherwise, I fear, many young people will find themselves on the scrap heap.