Ministers created a world where young people boast on TikTok about life on benefits. Now they must fix it

While it is dangerous to read too much into what is trending on social media, i was taken aback just the other day to see a thread on TikTok in which young people joked to their thousands of followers about their life on benefits.

in one video, captioned ‘What life is like living off the dole’, a young man walks through a shopping centre boasting that he is going to spend the day ‘drinking and smoking cigarettes in a public park at 2pm in the afternoon, which i am quite excited to do’.

in another, a group listens to music alongside a caption reading: ‘ When the dole is doubling the money’, while in another startling piece of footage, a young woman claims she receives benefits in excess of £1,100 a week — an amount that eliminates any need to work, as she forthrightly points out.

Malaise

Admittedly, i find those last figures rather hard to believe. But these videos immediately came to mind when i was confronted by the latest employment figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) this week. They make for sobering reading.

Around 9.25 million people deemed to be of working age (that is, between 16 and 64) are currently not in employment or seeking work — a rise of about 700,000 on the equivalent figure before the onset of the pandemic.

Nearly a third of that number — three million — are under 25, a jump of 384,000 compared with last year, which takes the total to its highest since ONS records began 30 years ago.

in other words, while much of the surge in economic inactivity during Covid was driven by older workers opting for early retirement or leaving jobs because of longterm sickness, the trend has now gone into reverse.

The number of 50 to 64year- olds out of work has fallen by nearly 200,000 as their younger counterparts increasingly opt out of the workforce.

This is not due to a shortage of jobs either. There are currently 908,000 unfilled vacancies out there, due to what Office for Budget Responsibility chairman Richard hughes calls a ‘worrying trend’ of worklessness and rising levels of inactivity, with young people leading the charge.

i would go one step further and say it is down to something far more sinister: a malaise in our working population the likes of which i have not witnessed since the dark days of the 1970s.

Gone is a sense of collective responsibility and the largely unspoken notion that anyone who is capable should contribute productively to their community.

Both have been replaced by a pervading conviction that people are entitled to do whatever they want — or nothing at all — and expect the taxpayer to foot the bill.

i have seen this at first hand in my restaurant businesses. Most of our workforce is under 23 and we are constantly recruiting new people as we expand.

luckily, we still manage to find plenty of enthusiastic, capable and hard-working youngsters, eager to get on in life and make a positive contribution to wherever they work. But we also see many applicants who entirely lack this sense of commitment, and are clearly loath to take on any work that they consider beneath them.

Many make this clear at interview, telling us immediately what they want from the job, rather than asking what we expect of them. Some will even stipulate the hours they are prepared to work upfront, with requests to spend at least two days per week working from home still surprisingly common.

it is tragic to see so many universities imbuing their students with inflated expectations, which inevitably fail to be met in the workplace, thereby creating disappointment and unhappiness.

Which brings me, inevitably, to the issue of mental health, today’s equivalent of the ‘bad back’ when it comes to employee sick days and long- term absence from work, particularly among young people.

Alongside those statistics from the ONS, research from the Resolution Foundation think-tank shows that the number of 18 to 24-year-olds ‘ economically inactive’ because of illness doubled in the decade to 2023 — with mental health cited as the biggest issue.

Undoubtedly, there are complex reasons underpinning this stark rise, but i am convinced that the Government’s bountiful largesse during the pandemic accelerated an already damaging trend for people to become more risk averse and quicker to self- diagnose ailments, both mental and physical.

While i am in no way minimising the suffering of those with genuine psychiatric issues, i cannot help but believe that much of the reported rise in mental health diagnoses comes down to the increasing medicalisation of often normal human emotions, such as being anxious or sad.

Catastrophe

Among graduates in particular, the gap in expectations between the rosetinted images of the future they were fed in their seminars, versus the reality of life at the coalface — which often starts with a slow, thankless slog up the ladder — seems to be the root of a great deal of unhappiness.

Whatever the reasons, it amounts to nothing less than an unfolding catastrophe. And you don’t have to take my word for it: the Resolution Foundation’s senior economist louise Murphy also agrees.

She said this week that the spiralling number of young people out of work due to sickness poses bigger longterm risks for Britain’s economy than older people dropping out of the workforce.

Underpinning it, moreover, is a legacy of years of deeply misguided policies that have severely undermined the incentive to work for young and old alike.

Much of this came to a head during the catastrophic furlough system during the pandemic, in which a large swathe of the population was being paid substantial sums explicitly not to work — a system that, continued as it was for months on end, has had dire consequences.

Misguided

While the incentive to work is not purely financial, it’s the predominant reason for most. Once eliminated, it is almost inevitable that employment loses its allure.

The same goes for our generous benefits system: there is no question in my mind that many aspects of it reduce the financial benefit of working for a living.

indeed, as the young woman claiming to receive in excess of £1,100 a week succinctly put it: ‘Somebody please tell me why i would get a job when this is the universal credits i get? [sic]’.

When it works like this, the benefits system is not a ‘safety net’, it is an alternative to working.

All of this would be concerning enough if we had a robust economy but, needless to say, we do not — having only just left a technical recession.

economists the world over know the link between a diminishing workforce and inflation — the latter rises as the former falls — and so if productivity doesn’t increase, there is less money for everything.

That’s why the ONS figures should be a wake-up call for all of us — and especially the Government. it is largely their misguided policies that have created this disaffection among the young. it is therefore the Government which must act now to ensure that our ‘working population’ lives up to its name.