By John Knox
With youth unemployment in the UK breaking through the one million mark, and 100,000 in Scotland, it is time to rebalance our national resources towards young people. In the panic of the recession we have forgotten them.
Young people have been bashed about the ears from all directions. One in five is now unemployed. Those who go to university have been burdened with debt – and, in England, they have been walloped with a trebling of fees, from £3,000 to £9,000 a year. The colleges, too, have been short-changed.
And if a young person decides to go for an apprenticeship, there is only a one-in-four chance of getting one. The council cuts will almost certainly mean fewer youth clubs and sporting facilities. Teachers, lecturers and other youth workers are going on strike over pensions. And the Age of Austerity has only just begun.
It is not much wonder that a whole “lost generation” is retreating into the virtual world of the iPlayer, the smartphone and the computer game. They are switching off from grim reality. Some, the twitching few, are taking to the streets to protest – and, sometimes, to riot.
This neglect of our young people – and I speak as a pensioner in his 60s – is shockingly reflected in the budgets of our public institutions. According to the Treasury’s expenditure and revenue figures for Scotland, the so-called GERS (Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland) figures for 2009–10, health spending was £10.7 billion or 18 per cent of the total budget.
That spending, largely on older people (two-thirds of hospital beds, for instance), compares to just 13 per cent or £7.7 billion for education and training. Spending on “social protection” was £20 billion or 34 per cent of the total – and, again, most of that money went to adults, not young people, in the form of pensions, social care, disability and unemployment benefits.
And if you look at the Scottish parliament’s spending since devolution, the emphasis is again on older people. Free personal care, free prescriptions, concessionary bus travel for the over-60s. But for the young it has been a story of extra taxes, from alcohol pricing to the student endowment (remember that, and remember too the failure to tackle student debt or the failure to help first-time buyers get on the property ladder).
A study by the Institute for Public Policy Research found that, in the first five years of devolution, spending on health grew by 57 per cent (again mainly spent on the elderly), but spending on education and training only grew by 38 per cent. And not much has changed since then. Devolution has been good for the old but not so good for the young. And yet the watchword of the policymakers has been “early intervention”.
I am not saying that the government has ignored young people entirely, just that it is not spending enough on them, compared with what it spends on older people. True, there are free nursery places for all three- and four-year-olds, there is a large school rebuilding programme, and a young person’s rights bill is going through parliament. But notice it was the health budget that was protected from the Age of Austerity cuts, not the education budget. There is a huge new hospital being built in Glasgow – but colleges are being merged. We are to spend over £1bn on a new Forth bridge, but sportscotland only has £10 million to spend on sports facilities.
In particular, we are neglecting the 16–24 age group. This may be because they look healthy enough, have already been given a schooling, the private sector is supposed to be offering them work and their parents are supposed to be supporting them into adulthood. But, in fact, their hopes are being dashed. All their hard work at school and university appears to be counting for nothing, the private sector is not creating enough jobs and their parents are letting them down.
Young people are suffering in silence because that is the fashion of the moment. We are a long way from the 1960s. But I have a feeling that youngsters are more delicate than we think, and I fear we are ruining the next generation.
There needs to be a big shift in government spending away from the NHS and towards education, apprenticeships, sports and culture – all labour intensive (job-creating) activities, incidentally. And the private sector should be encouraged to take on young people by abolishing the employers' National Insurance contributions for staff under the age of 30 and increasing them for those over 50.
The deal in society is that you are brought up for free but you contribute later in life. Those of us who have benefited from a free upbringing (particularly a free university education) need to start fulfilling our part of the bargain.
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