Young hopes blighted as opportunities vanish
Author: Faiza ShaheenDate: 19/08/2009
Publication: Yorkshire Post
Youth unemployment has dominated headlines in the past few months. The most recent statistics, for June, show that it is fast approaching a million. Almost one in five young people, aged 16 to 24, is unemployed, compared with one in 20 adults.
Having so many young people out of work spells trouble for the individuals, local communities and the wider economy.
UK cities have been hit hard by the recession, and Yorkshire and the Humber cities are no exception. While Leeds and York have so far avoided a big spike in youth unemployment, Hull, Doncaster and Barnsley are among the 10 UK cities and towns with the highest percentage of young people on Job Seeker's Allowance.
The question is - why have young people been disproportionately hit by this recession? And why have some parts of Yorkshire and Humber become youth unemployment "hot spots"?
Young people are particularly vulnerable during a recession because firms stop hiring. They are also more likely to make young people redundant because they are the least experienced. And the firms that are hiring are flooded with over-qualified applicants. The result has been that young people are pushed to the back of the queue.
But this doesn't explain why a young person living in Barnsley is three times more likely to be unemployed than one living in York.
Centres like Hull, Doncaster and Barnsley relied relatively heavily on manufacturing - a sector of the economy that has suffered blow after blow during this recession. Since the beginning of this recession, hundreds of jobs have been lost from the closure of factories like Northern Foods, in Hull, Rugby Cement, in Doncaster, and the clothing manufacturer SR Gent, in Barnsley. And when these jobs go, there is less money to be spent in sectors like retail and leisure - traditionally areas where young people were more likely to find entry-level work.
Skills are another key piece to the youth unemployment puzzle. Young people with no formal qualifications are twice as likely to claim benefits as those who have. For places like Hull and Barnsley, where more than 10 per cent of the population have no qualifications and school-leavers are less statistically likely to leave with five A-Cs, young people are much more exposed to periods of joblessness.
While youth unemployment has only recently made the headlines, it's by no means a new issue for Yorkshire and the Humber. Even before the recession began, towns like Barnsley and Doncaster saw above-average proportions of their young population claiming Job Seeker's Allowance.
They have been battling to re-build their economies in the aftermath of de-industrialisation. But the skills profile of their population no longer matches Britain's growth industries, which are increasingly in the service sector. This begs the question, is there anything Hull, Doncaster and Barnsley can do to cut the number of young people joining the local Job Centre queues?
In the Budget, the Government announced the Future Jobs Fund, targeted at helping young people who have been out of work for a year or more into work. The £1bn initiative aims to create 150,000 jobs between 2009 and 2011 and has invited bids for newly-created jobs from local authorities.
A couple of weeks ago Yorkshire and Humber heard it was to receive funding for up to 1,500 jobs from Barnsley to the Humber.
It's clear that the fund is a sticking-plaster initiative - projections indicate that the number of young people out of work for 12 months is likely to be 350,000 by the end of 2011, more than double the fund's scope.
Furthermore, at a price of £6,500 per job, the placements will last for only six months. The fund may be a modest helping hand for cities and towns suffering the economic effects of recession, but it will not address their more entrenched problems over the longer term.
Given these challenges, cities like Hull need to target their funding carefully. Six-month work placements should be given primarily to the work-ready, whose chances of finding work have been hampered by the recession. Support for the longer-term young workless should be delivered by existing initiatives, such as the Flexible New Deal - and cities should be thinking very carefully about how to address longer-term problems, such as low skill levels, to be ready to attract investment once the upturn comes.
The bottom line is that cities and towns have to be smart about how they tackle the growing number of young people joining their jobs
queue, as well as remaining concerned about the issue of more entrenched worklessness.
In times of recession, jobs are inevitably lost, but young people are the labour pool for the future. Both individual careers and the productiveness of entire local economies are scarred when people spend periods out of work early on in their working lives.
Cities and towns need to tackle the youth unemployment challenge now - the recovery of their economies depends upon it.
A version of this article first appeared in the Yorkshire Post.
