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Welcome to this week’s The State We’re In. Today, I’d like to take you to north London. Specifically, Boxpark in Camden, where I joined the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Pat McFadden, at a Youth Guarantee Jobs Fair on Monday.
This was a far cry from the formality of the job centre I visited in Birmingham a couple of weeks ago.
Instead of being greeted by locked doors and security guards, recruiters for employers ranging from Arsenal Football Club to local law firms, from HS2 to the NHS, had set up stalls among food and coffee stands.
More than once, I was mistaken for a young person in search of employment and greeted with smiles, treats including chocolate bars, branded pens and baseball caps before a flurry of questions about what I’d like to do with my life.
Coming up in this week’s newsletter:
What happens at a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) job fair? How, exactly, do you solve a problem like youth unemployment? And I ask Pat McFadden whether people have misunderstood the issue of “welfare reform”?Since I went to Birmingham, new official figures about the scale of Britain’s youth unemployment crisis have been released. As experts had long predicted, this data confirmed that the situation with so-called Neets (young people who are not in education, employment or training) had worsened.
As of the end of May, 1.01 million 16 to 24-year-olds are classed as Neet. This represents 13.5 per cent of all young people, marking the first time the figure has exceeded one million since 2013 in the aftermath of the global financial crisis.
Sitting down with McFadden, I asked whether the man responsible for Britain’s welfare system was worried about Neets. “I think the narrative that says young people are shirkers and snowflakes and too soft for this world and all the rest of it is wrong,” he said.
Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden talks to Vicky Spratt. ‘The best way into welfare reform for me is to put work and opportunity at its heart,’ he saysSince McFadden took over at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), improving skills for over-18s has also been added to his remit. “We’re now matching the traditional benefits role of the department with more of a work and opportunities role,” he explained. “I’m really keen to do more of that.”
This likely hints at the direction of travel for welfare reform, which is expected to be announced for young people later this year once Alan Milburn, the Government’s youth unemployment tsar, makes his recommendations.
McFadden described the job fair as “buzzing”. He’s not wrong.
I meet 21-year-old Daley from north London who is searching for work. Daley is shy, but as we talk he opens up. He’s looking for construction work and says it’s great “to actually be in the same place as employers, so you know you’re talking to a person”.
Nearby, a young woman is wandering around with a stack of physical copies of her CV, which she is handing out. Another young woman is doing the same next to a doughnut stand; she has a young baby in tow.
Increasingly, young people are telling concerning stories about applying for dozens (sometimes even hundreds) of jobs and “hearing nothing back”.
Amina, 24, has just finished a law degree. This is the situation she finds herself in. She’s currently relying on universal credit because “nobody replies” when she applies for jobs. She is hovering around a stand for a local solicitors’ firm which specialises in family law – the area she’d like to get into.
“It’s really competitive and tough at the moment… I’ve been looking for a job for over six months, but everything is online, and I wanted to come in person and see if it makes a difference,” Amina says.
McFadden is clear that the majority of young people he meets “want to work” and are putting in the legwork to find a job. On the flipside, he says employers need to do their bit to.
Labour has been criticised for piling additional costs onto employers via increased national insurance contributions and minimum wage rates. However, the Government has also announced a Youth Guarantee – an £823m scheme that offers funding to employers who give jobs to long-term unemployed young people, to the tune of £3,000, as well as other funding for training and apprenticeships.
McFadden cites Marks and Spencer’s recent decision to make 1,000 new training roles available for young people. “That’s fantastic,” he says. “I hope more employers do this… Government will do what we can to expand work opportunities for young people, but I want to work with employers – large and small – to do the same.”
Here, it’s possible to see how that might work in action. The Londoner hotel is offering hospitality roles which come with training. Their stand is next to that of a major homecare company, which has representatives talking to the young people in attendance about why care work might be for them.
In the next row of stalls, Hendon FC, a north London football club, also has a stand. They’re offering paid work experience roles in everything from turnstile management to jobs in the club shop.
Tottenham Hotspur FC’s stall at the jobs fairBrendan, 19, left college last year. He studied music. “I’m looking for retail roles,” he says. “But I am also doing an early-years training course, so I could do nursery work as well.”
He is slightly nervous to be at the fair. I ask him why. “It’s nice to see employers putting the effort in,” he says. He adds that online job applications are “a black hole” because “they don’t reach out to you to let you know you didn’t get the job or tell you about how you can improve”.
A rejection email came into Brendan’s email “just last week” telling him he hadn’t got some Christmas temp work he had applied for.
He laughs: “Yeah, I’d figured I didn’t get it by May!”
I ask McFadden how he sees the welfare system and whether it’s providing the right support for young people. “We hear this phrase ‘welfare reform’ a lot,” the Work and Pensions Secretary says, “But, I see all of this as welfare reform.
“I see the hiring incentives as welfare reform. I see 300,000 extra work experience places as welfare reform. The best way into welfare reform for me is to put work and opportunity at its heart.”
Britain’s welfare state is as large as it is complex. Changing it is a tall order. Not least because, as I have reported, there are so many cliff edges, which mean people lose support, such as housing benefit, if they enter paid work.
McFadden acknowledges that cliff edges are an issue and says the way to change the welfare state for the better is to start “with the right exam question”.
As he sees it, that is not assessing people and seeing what benefits they’re entitled to (which has been the modus operandi of the system for some time) but, instead, talking to people and working out how the Government can help them to change their lives.
“From there, the policy flows,” McFadden says before heading back out to visit employer stalls.
It is certainly a change in direction, and any reforms won’t be without cost. But, as the world changes, and the way young people engage with the world of work changes, there is no other option.
What do you think? Do you have a benefits story you’d like to share? Let me know vicky.spratt@theipaper.com
Housing crisis watch
It’s been a while since I’ve covered house prices in detail – bear with me. I’ll have something on this issue for you very soon.
For now, though, consider this: house prices are falling.
The average value of a home in Britain edged down for the second consecutive month in May, according to Halifax. Its latest data suggests prices fell 0.1 per cent during the month, the same decline recorded in April. That means the average home costs £298,806, while annual growth only increased very slightly from 0.4 per cent to 0.5 per cent.
This follows a 0.6 per cent monthly fall reported by another major lender – Nationwide – earlier this month.
With economic uncertainty caused by Iran, on top of the higher living costs and mortgage rates that inflation has left British people enduring, house price growth like that seen in the 2010s is unlikely to return any time soon.
What I’ve been reading
My brilliant colleague Daniel Hewitt, the Investigations Editor over at ITV, has just published his first book. It’s called Left To Rot, and it builds on Dan’s excellent reporting about the housing crisis. In journalism, it’s a pleasure to have a little bit of healthy competition for stories from someone you respect. As much as I travel around Britain, uncovering various shameful examples of the housing crisis, Dan can be found doing the same. Our national conversation about housing is all the richer because of that. His new book brings that work together in one place, and once you’ve read it, you will, I am afraid, find that you are as concerned about the state of the nation as Dan and I are.Left to Rot: How Governments Have Betrayed Us and How We Fix It is published by Bristol Policy Press and available now.
Dan and I will be doing some joint events where I’ll be speaking about my first book, Tenants. I’ll share more information about those soon.
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