The future looks bleak for Britain’s young people – and Rishi Sunak isn’t helping | Rhi Storer
The pandemic has hit 16- to 25-year-olds hard, but post-Covid economic recovery plans have once again excluded them
Rishi Sunak faced questions from MPs on the Commons Treasury committee this month over his budget, which combines emergency Covid support schemes with the biggest tax rises since 1993. And while it is right to question his plans to cut the £20 a week universal credit uplift after six months or find out why 39 out of 45 towns that will benefit from the £1bn new “towns fund” are represented by Tory MPs, I couldn’t help but see an obvious oversight in much of the post-budget discussion: where are the proposed policies to help young people?
Search through Sunak’s budget speech, and you’ll find not one word related to “children”, “graduates” or even “teenagers”. And while “young” did appear in relation to the touted “kickstart scheme”, it’s clear that the chancellor has little interest in the generations below him. Statistics from the Centre for Economic Performance at LSE show those aged 16 to 25 will experience worse labour market outcomes in terms of job loss, not working and earnings losses during and after lockdown. They were more than twice as likely as older employees to have suffered job losses, with six in 10 seeing their earnings fall.
