Town where young feel doomed to worklessness
Middlesbrough is the epicentre of job inertia faced by the young. Melissa Lawford and Ben Butcher look closer
Matthew White was in year 11 when the pandemic hit. He had been struggling in school already. Then his lessons stopped. He went in for special classes that his school put on for people who needed extra help, but his GCSEs were determined by his mock results anyway. When he left school, it was the summer of 2020 and the country was still reeling from lockdown.
“I didn’t really have any expectations,” he said. “I didn’t really think I’d be working. It was just that thing of, if you don’t do well in school, you’re not going to do well in life and I didn’t do well in school. I won’t lie, I failed most of my stuff.”
Matthew’s father was in the Army but died when he was five. His mum stopped working to look after Matthew and his sister and the family lived off his father’s Army pension.
After leaving school, Matthew, 19, became what statisticians call a Neet – a young person who is not in employment, education or training.
He is not alone. Across Britain, the number of young people not joining the workforce or seeking further education when they leave school is on the rise. Some 12pc of all 16 to 24-yearolds are now Neets, suggest the most recent data. That is down only slightly from a peak seen over summer, which was itself the highest level since 2015.
The crisis is multifaceted but those on the front lines say a key problem is an increase in the number of children growing up in households where no adults work.
The number of working age adults who are neither in work nor looking for a job has jumped by 819,000 since Covid, according to the Office for National Statistics. Some 9.3m people aged 16 to 64 were economically inactive at the end of last year.
The sheer scale of worklessness in Britain has created a host of economic problems ranging from a rising benefits bill to struggles to kick-start economic growth.
But what is particularly worrying is the potential long-term effects.
“Multigenerational worklessness means those young people have got nothing to aspire to,” says Wayne Mason, chief executive at the Linx Project, which runs youth clubs in Middlesbrough.
There are fears that many young people who do not grow up with parents or other adults who work may never find jobs.
Growing up in a workless household means children are less likely to expect to work themselves, says Heather Insull, strategy manager at Focus Youth North East in the town, which works with young people aged 10 to 18.
She estimates around 30pc of the children and teenagers she encounters come from workless households.
“Some of the kids have parents and grandparents who also haven’t worked for whatever reason,” says Insull.
“For the child, it seems quite normal to them that their parents don’t work. When you’re surrounded by that, you don’t know any different.”
In the decade up to 2020, the number of children in households where all working age adults had been out of work for at least a year steadily declined. Then came the pandemic: between 2020 and 2022, the number of children in workless households rose by 129,000 to 1.13m.
The epicentre of the crisis is the North East. Here, nearly one in seven children, or 13.5pc, are growing up without a family member in a job.
Within the area, Middlesbrough has the highest proportion of children in workless households. The town, where Matthew lives, offers a window on how the pandemic threatens to derail the prospects of future generations.
Helping young people into the world of work can be an involved process. “It’s right back to the basics,” says Jan Sturdy, who works at the Lingfield Learning Centre, which runs study programmes and supported internships for 16 to 24-year-olds who are slipping through the net. “We have gone to their houses to get them at the front door to travel with them.”
Their work also includes sessions on how to budget and buy ingredients from a supermarket.
“A lot of them have really no concept of money at all,” she says.
Around half of the young people Sturdy works with come from longterm workless households.
“We have some people who come to us who don’t know what it is to have to get to a place of work by nine in the
‘For the child, it seems quite normal to them that their parents don’t work’
‘They put it into my head that you can work, that you can become something if you try’
morning, because three generations of their family never have,” she explains.
Some parents actively discourage their children from getting a job, she says. “We have parents who are receiving benefits who don’t want their kids to work.”
This is a particular problem when children are on educational healthcare plans, which means their parents receive money to support their special educational needs.
“You wouldn’t believe the amount of money that’s coming into some households because of the educational healthcare plans,” says Sturdy.
She knows of one family where at least three of the children were on plans, meaning they received more than £90,000 per year in benefits. “The mum didn’t want her kids to work because she would lose that.”
The issue is complex. But what most agree on is the pandemic has turbocharged the problem.
Lockdown meant children missed school. Covid restrictions closed many of the shops and cafés where young people would have got their first jobs. And the shift to home working means it is more difficult to build interpersonal skills.
“I observed one of the team interviewing a young person and I was quite shocked at how socially isolated they were, because they were so used to just being in their bedroom playing Call of Duty on the PlayStation. They had become fearful of going out.” says Karen Taylor, who works at Thirteen Group, a housing association which runs employment programmes.
The loss of school time and work experience means young people have become much more reliant on their parents for support, says Lauren Mistry, deputy chief executive of Youth Employment UK. For young people who do not have adults at home who can help them, the odds are increasingly stacked against them.
In Middlesbrough, problems with worklessness began long before the pandemic. Teesside has been hammered by the decline of the mining, steel and shipbuilding industries, formerly the lifeblood of the local economy. Productivity in the North East shrank more rapidly between 2019 and 2021 than any other region in the UK.
The strain is clear in the town centre, where many of the shopfronts are shuttered with corrugated iron. Marks & Spencer closed its Middlesbrough outpost last spring. The store is empty and dark. So are the windows of the former Debenhams, which closed in 2021. So is the former House of Fraser, which shut in 2022.
In the region’s heyday, young people had a clear pathway into skilled employment regardless of how well they did in school, says Kevin Franks, chief executive at Youth Focus North East. “When you left school at 16, you either went into college or an apprenticeship. And that would mean that at the end of four years you would have a higher qualification.
“But the whole apprenticeship scheme was just decimated by the reduction in the shipbuilding industry, the steel industry, the mining industry. We’ve never recovered from that.”
Now, staying in education is the only clear path to employment in Middlesbrough, Franks says.
“Those who are less academic basically get sidelined. Then they fall further and further behind.”
Elliot Drury-Crockett has worked a series of short-term jobs, spent time unemployed and applied to many jobs with little luck since he was 17.
“The older generation thinks that we don’t want to work,” says DruryCrockett, now 26. “But I see friends and family who want work so badly.”
Finding gainful employment has been a struggle: “I really tried everything, Indeed, Reed, Facebook.”
Middlesbrough is in the heart of the Red Wall, where the Tories gained so many seats in the 2019 election on Boris Johnson’s Levelling Up promise. However, unlike the neighbouring constituencies, Middlesbrough continued to vote Labour in 2019.
It has been receiving Levelling Up cash, but Mason says this is failing to get to the root of the problem.
“What I’ve seen is improvements in rail infrastructure and roads. You don’t need rail and roads if you haven’t got a job. You don’t need to get anywhere if you haven’t got a job.”
The Government is trying to boost jobs. In 2021, Teesside was designated the country’s first Freeport, a special economic zone with big tax breaks, in a move designed to create 18,000 jobs.
This will help but the crux of the problem is in helping young people become employable, says Mason.
“In five years’ time, when all this new industry comes on board, we think there’s going to be quite a vacuum in terms of the number of young people who will be able to apply for those roles because they’re not qualified. We need to start young.”
Franks believes the biggest issue is not technical qualifications but life skills. “Businesses constantly tell us that their struggle with young people is that they might come in very bright, but they are not prepared for the world of work,” he says.
“Employers say they would much rather have people who understand what it is to work in a team, can work with others, and they can teach them the technical skills that they need.”
Many young people are unprepared even for college, Franks adds. There is a phenomenon known as the “January drop-off ”, when teenagers do not come back after the Christmas holidays. “When you drop out then, your outcomes dramatically change.”
What does seem to be making a difference in Middlesbrough are front-line youth groups. After nearly a decade of job-hunting, Drury-Crockett is about to start work as an urban ranger at the council and hopes to become a park ranger on the Yorkshire Moors. He was helped by Thirteen Group, which gave him a laptop, a bus pass and help writing applications.
“You don’t get anywhere near the same level of support when you go to the Job Centre,” he says.
Matthew, too, has found hope. While his mother dropped out of work to look after him after his father died, she had experience of working and he credits her with helping him to navigate his way through.
“She was perfect,” Matthew says. “She would coach me and say it’s going to hurt but it’s something you’re going to be able to get through.”
Finding the Lingfield Learning Centre was the real turning point for Matthew. It helped him find a parttime job working as a steward. Now, he plans to train to become a security guard. “Lingfield were the first people that actually put it into my head that you can work, that you can become something if you really try. When they said that I actually started to knuckle down and look for jobs. It has improved my life a hell of a lot.”
In Middlesbrough, White and Drury-Crockett are among the lucky ones. Many other young people risk being doomed to a life of worklessness.
A government spokesman said: “We have the second lowest rate of economic inactivity in the G7, and we’ve almost halved youth unemployment since 2010.
“We’ve reduced the number of workless households by one million since 2010. Our £2.5bn Back to Work plan will help break down barriers to work for over a million more people, including those with long-term sickness and disabilities.”