The Chancellor’s key soundbite during his Budget speech was that Britain will be “held aloft by the march of the makers”, but it will also be accompanied by the silent march to the jobcentre by the young jobless – especially those aged 16-19.
No one seems to have noticed that Osborne’s Budget was void of any substantial help for them. Instead, he offered tax breaks for corporations, to help their profit margins. And even what scraps he did offer had nothing to alleviate the pressures faced by young people in this country today.
The government will say it is increasing apprenticeships by 12,500 a year. Although this is of course welcome, ultimately it will be possible only if there are jobs created. More importantly, however, it has nothing to offer the almost 200,000 young people doing NVQs, many of whom will be receiving EMA or will have to complete the course to be able to go on to do an actual apprenticeship.
The Budget did not have a single word to say to these young people. If anything, George Osborne’s silence on this speaks volumes for this government’s overall commitment to the young.
Take the news on stamp duty: the average age of a first-time housebuyer is 30 and is expected by some to rise to 44. Or the raising of the personal allowance: this won’t help the almost one million unemployed young people in the country. And as only 23 per cent of 16-to-17-year-olds were in employment in the last quarter of 2010, this is clearly not something the majority of adolescents can benefit from.
Then there was the headline announcement: a penny off fuel duty, accompanied by fare rises of 6.2 per cent on average. How will this help young people, when so many more of them use public transport?
You would think that, faced with such facts, the last thing a government would do, if it really had the interests of young people at heart, would be to continue scrapping EMA, especially after a number of leading economists last week signed an open letter in support of the policy. Osborne could have even looked at his own Budget, as on page 33 of the Red Book it even states that participation in learning by 16-to-18-year-olds has continued to rise.
But no extra money will come from the Treasury for EMA’s planned replacement, meaning that it will have to be found from within the Education Department, leading to further education cuts.
There are strong rumours that the extra funding will come from careers advice for 16-to-19-year-olds, an area heavily deprived of funds already. Only this week leading head teachers warned the government that closing the Connexions youth service will put almost two million young people at risk of having to enter the job market bereft of advice.
The English economic historian and advocate of further education R H Tawney wrote of education in England in the 1920s that the biggest obstacle it faced was that “the prevailing temper of Englishmen is to regard as most important that which is commercially profitable, and as of only inferior importance that which is not”. Ninety years later, it still rings true.
James Mills is part of the Save EMA campaign.
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