‘Mountain to climb’: how Labour is facing a crisis in youth unemployment
Getting started in the world of work was not easy for Rose Green.Having experienced half a dozen children’s homes from the age of 13 while growing up in care in north London, finding a career was the last thing on her mind.“Having that corporate parenting, it can be difficult,” she says.“Sometimes things like completing school, or uni, you’re faced with so much trauma that you haven’t really got the time to finish all of that.“You’re kind of parenting yourself, raising yourself.
But you’re a child.You’re just cracking on doing what you think you’re supposed to do.Even today, I’m still figuring it out.”Despite those challenges, the 26-year-old from Camden has found work as an employment and training officer at the local council.After completing a care leaver internship, she now helps others to overcome the same hurdles.
Green’s work will be critical not just for the next generation but for the British economy at large, and for Keir Starmer’s government, as Labour promises to fix what experts have called a crisis in youth employment.Official figures on Thursday show that the number of young people not in education, employment or training (Neet) has leapt by more than a quarter in the past five years to reach almost 1 million.In the three months to June, there were 948,000 young people aged 16 to 24 who were Neet, according to the Office for National Statistics.The number has increased from 750,000 at the end of 2019, and by about 40,000 since Labour came to power a year ago.Care leavers are significantly more likely to be among them.
The figures mean one in eight young people across the country are out of employment, education or training at a time when Britain’s jobs market is cooling, as employers grapple with higher taxes and a weak economic outlook.Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, acknowledges that Labour has a “mountain to climb” to bring down the numbers.“We’re making a start and I am absolutely determined we are going to deliver,” she says.Speaking at the Euston Skills Centre after meeting Green, other Camden council employment advisers, and young people in care, she said the government will extend a £45m scheme of “trailblazer” projects in eight English mayoral authorities to support young adults to find work.“We cannot have a generation of young people denied the opportunities they need,” Kendall said.
“It’s not good for them and it’s terrible for the country as well … it doesn’t have to be that way.”The scheme was launched this spring, with one year of funding.Kendall says the extension until spring 2027 will provide additional resources for the programme, which provides tailored job support.The schemes in London and Liverpool are focused on supporting care leavers.Other locations with trailblazers include the West Midlands, the Tees Valley, the East Midlands, the West of England combined authority and the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough combined authority.
However, while ministers have promised a “youth guarantee”, offering every young person access to education or training to help them find work, Labour has faced rising criticism that its other policies have had a chilling impact on the jobs market.Official figures show that unemployment has risen since Rachel Reeves’s £25bn rise in employer national insurance contributions and increase in the national living wage.Job vacancies in hospitality, retail and summer work – typically filled by younger adults – have also fallen sharply.Kendall has faced intense criticism.On the right of politics, the work and pensions secretary is under fire for the number of universal credit claimants hitting 8 million.
From within her own party, and among charities and campaigners, the government has been warned that “huge swathes” of severely disabled people will be hit by planned cuts to benefits, despite the high-profile U-turn on other changes to disability support.With a tough autumn budget looming, Reeves is under pressure to cover a multibillion-pound shortfall in the government finances, in part exposed by Labour’s retreat on planned disability benefit cuts.Despite offering a fresh £45m for eight youth trailblazer schemes, are the government’s other changes not pushing in the opposite direction? And might the work and pensions secretary be pressed to make further savings?Kendall is defiant.“I am under no illusions about the scale of the task.And you can’t just flick a switch and put right a decade of stagnant growth and poor support.
“But we are putting this in place,It is making a difference to real people,And I will shout that from the rooftops,”The best public interest journalism relies on first-hand accounts from people in the know,If you have something to share on this subject you can contact us confidentially using the following methods.
Secure Messaging in the Guardian appThe Guardian app has a tool to send tips about stories.Messages are end to end encrypted and concealed within the routine activity that every Guardian mobile app performs.This prevents an observer from knowing that you are communicating with us at all, let alone what is being said.If you don't already have the Guardian app, download it (iOS/Android) and go to the menu.Select ‘Secure Messaging’.
SecureDrop, instant messengers, email, telephone and postIf you can safely use the tor network without being observed or monitored you can send messages and documents to the Guardian via our SecureDrop platform.Finally, our guide at theguardian.com/tips lists several ways to contact us securely, and discusses the pros and cons of each.
Michael Sheen says prospects for actors from poorer backgrounds ‘quite scary’
Michael Sheen has warned the pathways that helped him break into acting have all but collapsed, as he said the “bank of mum and dad” would be unable to support aspiring actors from poorer communities.The Good Omens star, who grew up in the working class community of Port Talbot, said he had benefited from school support, youth theatres and grants that have since come under financial pressure or been abolished entirely.He said his journey was also aided by a supportive family and the knowledge that his home town had already produced acting royalty in Richard Burton and Sir Anthony Hopkins. However, he said the prospect for actors from underprivileged backgrounds now looked “quite scary”.“Having those school plays where the drama was happening in my school – then there was a youth theatre that was funded through the education department of the council, and then I got a grant to go to drama school,” said Sheen, who was speaking at an event opening the Edinburgh TV festival
Aubrey Plaza talks about her husband’s suicide: ‘A daily struggle, obviously’
The actor Aubrey Plaza has opened up about the suicide of her husband, director Jeff Baena, who died in January.The White Lotus and Parks and Recreation star was speaking to Amy Poehler for her podcast Good Hang when she was asked how she was doing during “a terrible, terrible, tragic year”.“Right in this very, very present moment, I feel happy to be with you,” Plaza said. “Overall, I’m here and I’m functioning. I feel really grateful to be moving through the world
Met chief rejects calls to scrap live facial recognition at Notting Hill carnival
The Metropolitan police commissioner has hit back at demands to drop the use of live facial recognition cameras at this weekend’s Notting Hill carnival over concerns of racial bias and an impending legal challenge.Mark Rowley wrote in a letter that the instant face-matching technology would be used at Europe’s biggest street carnival “in a non-discriminatory way” using an algorithm that “does not perform in a way which exhibits bias”.He was responding to a letter from 11 anti-racist and civil liberty organisations, disclosed in the Guardian, that urged the Met to scrap the use of the technology at an event that celebrates the African-Caribbean community.The Runnymede Trust, Liberty, Big Brother Watch, Race on the Agenda, and Human Rights Watch were among those who claimed in the letter to Rowley on Saturday that the technology “will only exacerbate concerns about abuses of state power and racial discrimination within your force”.Campaigners claim the police have been allowed to “self-regulate” their use of the technology because of the lack of a legal framework and deploy the technology’s algorithm at lower settings that are biased against ethnic minorities and women
Broadcast News: a romcom set in a TV studio that manages to make integrity sexy
“I am concerned about the garbage that is masquerading as television these days,” the legendary US news anchor Walter Cronkite declared in 1989. “Most of it is real scandal tabloid journalism … absolutely, totally useless stuff.”Two years earlier Broadcast News was writing this on the wall. The decline of journalistic standards isn’t a conventional backdrop for a romcom (His Girl Friday being another key exception) but it was a matter close to the heart of James L Brooks, who had come up through CBS as a news writer before his prolific TV career (via The Mary Tyler Moore Show and, later, The Simpsons). In the wake of the thunderous success of his film Terms of Endearment, Brooks returned to CBS for a period of rigorous research and latched on to the decorated news producer Susan Zirinsky – the main inspiration for his next film’s indomitable heroine
Police officers warned against dancing with revellers at Notting Hill carnival
For George Michael, it was guilty feet that left him unable to dance. For Eddy Grant, a world full of problems left him rooted to the spot as the music played.But for police officers amid the sound systems at this weekend’s Notting Hill carnival, it is orders from on high that dictate that no matter how the beat moves them, they are banned from dancing with revellers.Down the decades the scenes of officers strutting their stuff was seen as a cheesy but welcome attempt at repairing strained community relations.But in a statement on Monday, the Metropolitan police made it clear they feel a twerk or rhythmic shake of the hips may distract or slow down the 7,000 officers deployed to the carnival from responding to outbreaks of crime
‘It’s like having a button that makes the audience go nuts’: Deep Purple on Smoke on the Water
‘We went to see Frank Zappa at Montreux casino. But someone fired a flare gun into the ceiling and – whoosh! The whole building went up in flames’We wanted a more exciting sound than we had been getting in conventional recording studios, so hired the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio for three weeks to record in the Montreux casino. It was 1971 and the night before we were due to begin, we went to see Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention play in the casino as part of the Montreux jazz festival, but – as the song puts it – “some stupid with a flare gun” fired into the ceiling.Sparks came down and everyone had to get out. I became separated from the band so went back inside to find them
Why Shabana Mahmood’s outlook on prisons is wrong | Letter
Action to tackle number of asylum seekers coming to UK is important step to ‘restoring order’, says Cooper – as it happened
Stella Creasy and Richard Tice call for scrutiny over which EU laws UK ditches
Labour-run councils consider legal challenges to asylum hotels
How Labour can build a stronger British economy | Letters
Reeves leaves no stone unturned as she mulls reforms for property tax