Young unemployed must take up training or face benefits cut
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/11/18/young-unemployed-must-do-training-or-face-benefits-cut/
by 1DarkStarryNight
Young unemployed must take up training or face benefits cut
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/11/18/young-unemployed-must-do-training-or-face-benefits-cut/
by 1DarkStarryNight
41 comments
> Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall reportedly ‘will not allow’ young adults not to be in some form of education, employment or training
> Young unemployed people must take up training or face having their benefits cut under plans being drawn up by the Work and Pensions Secretary.
> The Times reported that Ms Kendall “will not allow” young adults not to be in some form of education, employment, or training, and will strip benefits from those who do not take up offers of support.
> A government source told the newspaper that the proposals would usher in “the biggest reforms to employment support in a generation”.
The source said: “Conditionality is a fundamental principle of the social security system and has always existed. That’s not going to change.”
> Britain’s welfare bill has soared in recent years amid a surge in claims for mental health conditions, meaning one in 10 adults of working age are now on sickness benefits.
Duh, every government keeps saying this but the situation doesn’t change.
While I’m supportive of denying benefits to young people who are not in work, in education or training, I notice the article doesn’t mention who would be considered exceptions.
We have an increasing number of young people now under section 3 of the Mental Health Act, locked up in hospitals. They can’t take on work or education and mental health hospitals don’t provide all their needs (believe it or not, they don’t provide ladies with sanitary products like pads / tampons!). These patients still need some money for basics.
For the 2 weeks I ended up signing on, all the courses they had seemed to be things like ‘office admin’ and ‘applying for jobs in the civil service’ and other equally pointless (for someone who’s worked in finance for 10+ years).
If the courses were good people would go on them.
This happened in the late 90s with Labours NEW DEAL where young people needed to take up in work training or lose their benefits
This happened in the early 2010s with the the Tories work/train for your benefits
Seems like every 10 years someone comes up with the same idea
Plenty of young people are not training, working, or studying because of long term sickness or care responsibilities. The Tories have already turned conditionality within the DWP up to the maximum, I don’t understand how Labour can cut benefits even further without hurting people who genuinely need them. The idea that there is widespread misuse or fraud of benefits has been proven to be false and will continue to be false but somehow Labour is still behaving as if that’s true.
Absolutely needed but let’s be fair too, there’s 7 million unemployed and 1 million jobs (roughly speaking) and half of them will be skills that young people don’t possess.
The only way to lower youth unemployment is to have more apprenticeship / tax off hiring incentives – but actually make them lucrative. Not just accumulative value to big business.
The government has just hit SMEs over 4 people HARD so I won’t expect anything to change from the job market.
Probably more part time work and less full time in retail with all the changes coming in.
The last time I was on UC the “training” they wanted me to do was unpaid work at Tesco. I was always told that you had to be paid minimum wage for any actual work you did, then they tried to force me to do that..
Fortunately I found a job before that started.
Work or starve, sponging scroungers, say a bunch of old people who are scrounging right now.
Am I being cynical in thinking this will be a bunch of absolute bottom of the barrel “courses” provided by some big manpower/outsourcing company that are nothing more than box checking exercises that cost far more than the benefits and provide no employability benefit ^_^
A big problem graduates face is junior level jobs requiring 3 years experience. How are you supposed to get a start on your career if you cant get someone to give you a chance? Companies just seem allergic to the idea of training people.
If young people are provided the opportunity for free *certified* qualifications that are actually attractive to employers then I don’t see a problem with that.
But yeah, it should not be linked with their basic necessities to live.
Significant minority that are fully capable of ‘doing a shift’ but just are not willing to graft. That’s the number one reason agency-people/new hires come and go – a conscious decision not to graft.
I wonder how much of this so called “training” will be working for free in supermarkets/customer service/restaurants, free labour for the firms and pointless “training” aka slave labour for the poor.
If that training was valuable or productive and didn’t just lead to subsidised sub-minumum wage exploitation jobs then maybe young people would be more interested in taking them up.
Well, will you support them in getting into a training program
That won’t then conflict with mandatory job searching and pointless assessment meetings scheduled at the same time as the training course?
What about the retirees aged 50 who could still be working?
I work with young adults (mostly male) considered as “NEET”s. They are a long way from being employable.
Why just young people? Everyone should be working for a living. State support for should be left for the truly unable to work. Too many people resign themselves from work over issues that can be overcome.
At the same time we need jobs and buisness to accept these types of people and accomodate them best they can. Buisness these days run very lean on staffing, and don’t want to allow any buffer of personel in the workload. I really don’t want the goverment to have to subsidise positions, but it may work out cheaper than keeping them on benefits.
Too many young people with a supposed mental health issue or off sick indefinitely is the biggest issue here.
One thing is that we’re overdiagnosing young people with health issues and additionally, young people aren’t prepared for the realities of the world:
Realising that most people end up working 9-5 jobs for 45 years and then die is affecting them so much that they become depressed. They grow up on TikTok and YouTube and see people driving flash cars and living in big houses by making videos. However, once they switch off their computer or phone, they realise they have to grind for not very much every month.
Welcome to the real world chaps.
Absolutely agree with all the backlash comments about this.
As a hiring manager I always look for people who avoid training and have extended unemployment gaps.
I’ll always hire people who show strong defiance to any authority or help. Great team players. Good additions.
Then the job centres need reforming massively, I’m on a telecoms training course atm that i had to find thru indeed, I’ve been to several meetings at local job centre, my background is AV so surely anyone who gives af looking at me would suggest that right?
there needs to be willpower in the workforce there to get people back in jobs at every level, imagine instead if the worker next to yours overhears your convo and says shes heard about a course or role that is suuitable, rather than it just be a box ticking excercise to make sure you’re eligble for the dole
Training in what?
Training is unique to each individual job and employers aren’t willing to train (everyone needs a ridiculous amount of experience for starting roles).
Can I quit my job get benefits and learn a new trade for free?
Why do we keep electing down punching pricks who know nothing about reality?
What I find frustrating is when people claim to not be able to work any job but then they have kids. If you are up to the challenge of raising a child, there is some kind of job you should be able to do. If not, you can’t convince me they aren’t being selfish for having a child.
What training though? The problem it’s it’s always bullshit training, just forcing people to do nonsense, no employer cares if you have a NVQ in custom service, if they do they will pay for you to do it,
We live in a post scarcity society just certain people in the population want 1,000,000 times more than what others want
Why targeting just the young?
Yes let’s penalise those who have the most potential to contribute to the system and have taken the least out of the system thus far.
Why is it always young people being told they are the reason the country is falling apart, when the single greatest benefit by a country mile is pensions. While some people are likely out of work due to laziness, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume that, in the current economic climate, if you aren’t in work, it is probably not for lack of trying.
It is not specified who is going to have their benefits cut. If someone is out of work on disability benefit, are they going to be forced to attend training or have their benefits cut? That seems immoral, if you cant work because you are disabled, you probably can’t go to training sessions either.
There is massive value in offering training for those on jobseekers allowance, but the courses would need to be decent and of specific value. It would be too easy for these to be some rubbish online course which actually gives no real value.
Also for every article like this saying that there are too many people on benefits, there is another one complimenting it saying they had their disability benefits cut because while they could not see anything, they had a guide dog so DWP took their benefits away.
Overall, I think it is time we stop accusing the young and disabled of being benefit scroungers and reform the greatest benefit scroungers of them all: pensions.
The schemes need to be relevant and worthwhile not just box ticking pointless shite or free labour for supermarkets etc lol
Flipping hell.
University fees increased
Opportunities for Uni leavers decreased because of increased Employers NI
Economic growth is lower than expected
Now they want to slash their unemployment benefit instead of you know, handling it case by case?
The Tories in Red Ties are truly back.
Edit: don’t forget to defrost your elderly this winter as well.
If they want to solve this problem, they need to actually invest in youth work.
Sounds great if it’s real training for adequate pay – Subway sandwich artist apprenticeships for example are neither of those things.
Are these training courses going to increase the number of jobs available
I’m now 50yo, Chronic pain and bad health got me in the end, but till that happened, I literally did every good opportunity scheme while job searching, volunteering and college too all at the same time, pretty much none stop for way too long.
The one thing I learned while in the system was that, if your work coach says to you, we have this great opportunity for you, it is wise to do it, it’s like a secret code to tell you that it is in your best interest to do it now off your own back rather than wait to be forced, or if you refuse then something far worse is waiting in the pipeline for you.
Also, do your own research, find something you want to do, then find the places you need to go to to learn how to do it, how to get there, costs involved, and have it all laid out nice and neatly on paper so when you see your work coach you can present them with all the details, dot their I’s and cross their T’s and they’ll go out their way to make it happen for you, even get your travel costs covered.
Universal Credit is not as bad as it’s made out to be as long as you put the effort in and make the work coaches job as easy as possible, and have a can do attitude.
So, with universities cutting jobs and courses, post 16 technical colleges and polytechnics no longer being a thing and there certainly aren’t going to be enough apprenticeships for them all where are they going to get this training?
Make work actually pay so that people can afford a home, to have children, and to cover the often expensive essentials like food, bills and transport. Nobody wants to be a slave.
And, actually think about expanding jobs and training opportunities to begin with. There are no jobs and training in my area for young people- you have about 20 applicants competing for every vacancy that exists. No wonder there are so many NEETs.
Honestly some people are just so un able to work that it’s probably better to identify them, mark them as disabled, pay them for life and focus on others with more potential.
Youth opportunity program, employment training… sound familiar … it’s the same old training programs to get the figures down a look better overall… same as NVQ that was given out.. The running joke among employment services is that it stands for not very qualified. And yes, that was told to me by an employment advisor.
Is this new? Back in 2005 I was unemployed for a long time and was sent on a 2 week course. TBH it was fun and a chance to meet new people.
Based on ONS data the proportion of young people out of work because of mental health problems has doubled from approx. 6% in 2012 to approx 12% in 2022.
Also from ONS, the number of young people not working has increased from approx. 2 million to 3 million since 2005.
A really worrying trend for the UK government.
This will be just like the ’employment training’ program the jobcentre forced me to go on in the 90s. Got 16 mickey mouse qualifications that were utterly useless in the job market and the one I wanted to do and would have actually helped me into employment I wasn’t allowed to do unless I paid £500 up front out of £60 every 2 weeks benefit.
I was technically in work in the months that program ran for as you had to sign off when you joined. So not only was it a pointless waste of everyone’s time, it fiddled the government’s unemployed figures as well.
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