Lost Covid Generation 345
100,000 young Scots face a lifetime without work unless more funding and better training is introduced NOW
ONE hundred thousand young people in Scotland are facing life without a job.
As a report published today by the Alliance for Full Employment shows, the young Scots jobless are among one million young people in the UK who will not have a job to go to at the turn of the month.
The sheer scale of the problem shocks me. I fear the destruction of the hopes of this Class of 2020 will be as devastating as in the 80s when youth unemployment soared and YTS programmes were lambasted as “skivvy schemes”.
This lost Covid generation will be a social as well as employment crisis with rising mental health problems and an NHS unable to cope as young people with nothing to do feel isolated and desolate.
As the Scottish Government’s Higgins report on the economic recovery admitted: “Their job prospects will be a scar across their working lives if there is no urgent, ambitious and focused intervention to address it.”
The arithmetic of joblessness is frightening. Around 45,000 young Scots are officially unemployed and more than 55,000 are reported to be economically inactive and not in full-time education.
According to the Scottish
Government, more than 20 per cent of 16 to 24-year olds in Scotland could become unemployed in the absence of significant measures to protect jobs.
But we have also to count the young people made redundant from bars, cafes and restaurants, and those who have left school, college and university this summer and have no jobs.
The UK and Scott ish governments have made promises they are struggling to keep.
Boris Johnson guaranteed jobs, training or education. But his £2billion Kickstart scheme could eventually offer a place for just six months at 25 hours a week. It is too small to cover the 100,000 in need.
Nicola Sturgeon’s Scottish Jobs Guarantee for every 16 to 25-yearold is bolder.
This two-year guarantee was of “an opportunity at university or col lege, an apprenticeship programme, employment including work experience, or participating in a volunteering programme”.
The guarantee signalled, she said, an “absolute determination that youth unemployment will not be a legacy of this pandemic”.
Advisers proposed the Government pay employers 50 per cent of the wages of a new young recruit for 18 months and they have announced a one-off payment of £250 for a young person when starting a new job.
But the additional funding on offer – £60million extra for young people’s employment – does not match the scale of the need. The under-25s are two-and-a-half times more likely to be trapped in Covidhit sectors. At risk today are the jobs of many of the 80,000 Scots young people in tourism and thousands in the hotels, accommodation and food services sectors.
Young people will lose out if we do not act now to strengthen co-operation between the Scottish and UK governments. Both need to bury their differences to end youth unemployment.
We need an urgent youth jobs summit between Holyrood and
Westminster to address gaps and flaws in the current programmes.
We need young people training for jobs, not unemployment. Skills courses for jobs in demand – IT, logistics, caring for the elderly and even contract tracers – must be rapidily expanded.
We should be planning expansion of school, college and university places.
As with the Future Jobs Fund
Practical help with job searches, interviews and CV skills in 2009, we need to pay more attention to the quality of work experience and terms and conditions of work – and avoid a return to 80s YTS schemes. ● Teenagers need greater help with their job searches – so they can write the best job applications, offer the fullest CV and do the best interview.
To take a young person on permanently, many employers will need help – something like a £100 a week wage subsidy or proposed guarantee of 50 per cent of wage costs.
As major employers, local authorities should be given the resources to employ our young.
We need to put our arms around the young, not turn our backs on them – and as the youth crisis deepens, act with even more urgency, starting today.