Young people are ‘the new face of poverty’ – what are politicians doing about it?

It feels as if UK politics repeating a very tired story. A political drama fills newspaper front pages, and everyone accepts that politics is broken. All the while, very immediate problems are plaguing our society – that will, if we do not begin to be address them, have significant impact on future generations.

If this kind of bleak proclamation is little too vague,  type ‘young people UK’ into Google, and you’ll see what I mean. Headline articles read ‘Young people ‘feel they have nothing to live for’, Have young people never had it so bad? or one that seems to be relatively benign, Statistics about young people in the UK , turns out not to be entirely pleasant reading.

Yesterday, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation added another to the pile: Young, working and renting? The new face of poverty in UK. JRF’s findings showed – among other worrying facts – that people living in poverty are now as likely to be employed as not. And that the majority of these are young people. Over the past ten years, for 16-to-24 year olds, the poverty rate has risen from 25% to 31.5%.

And although there’s little research on this in relation to youth poverty, there’s surely a race-, gender- and class -based aspect to all of this, particularly when the three intersect.

The Government’s solution to these problems (ones that they’ve played such a big role in creating, although it’s not as if all this just began with the Coalition) is much like all of their others: do nothing, then make cuts.

In September, Cameron announced that he wanted to cut housing and employment benefits for 18 to 21-year olds – reducing the cap from £26,000 to £23,000. He cloaked this is the usual faux fairness by claiming that this would “end the idea that aged 18 you can leave school, go and leave home, claim unemployment benefit and claim housing benefit” and the money saved would be used to create 3 million new young apprenticeships by 2020.

Much like the scapegoating of immigrants, Cameron implied that large swathes of young people are cheating the system. The reality is many young people can’t get stable jobs – in fact UCU found that 9 in 10 of young people who are not in employment, education or training (NEETs) aspire to be, but a third feel they have ‘no chance’ of ever getting a job. It’s not laziness but lack of opportunities and, arguably, low confidence that are some of the biggest barriers to young people getting into work.

And creating more apprenticeships isn’t a catchall solution to youth unemployment. This is apparent if you look at apprentice salaries – if you’re between the age of 16-18 or if you’re 19 and over but in the first year of your apprenticeship you can be paid as little as £2.73 an hour. This kind of exploitation shouldn’t go unnoticed and jobs on these wages should certainly not be championed as a means by which to get young people into work.

Meanwhile, Government policy simply makes life harder for young people. In 2012, the Coalition introduced harsher rules in relation to benefit sanctions. Research has found that these new rules have meant the number of under 25s reported to be homeless has increased sixfold between 2013 and 2014. Amid all of this, last week Boris Johnson  waded into the debate; floating the idea of cutting funds going to youth and education schemes in London by 90%.

With these cuts come low pay, soaring house prices, trebling of tuition fees, and a lack of investment in on the job training.

What of the Labour leadership’s response? Their current policies are, undeniably, a marked improvement on the Tories’. Miliband said he’d increase the number of apprenticeships (although the same problems of low pay in this respect have not been addressed), and policies like the one he announced yesterday about creating more engineers are positive ones.

However, as the high levels of youth poverty and the skills shortage (among other problems) show there’s more, much more, to be done.

A good place for Miliband to start would be to pay due attention to the free education demonstration last week. As I and others have written, the Labour leadership need to talk about higher education fees – a subject that they’re yet to address. They must also take on scandalously low-paid apprenticeships, which could include pledging a statutory living wage by the end of next Parliament, to give people across society a wage they can live off; and, ensure employers are also investing in on the job training to help bridge the skills gap.

While the political world might obsess over a Tweet a politician sent, or a spat between MPs, it’s worth remembering that there are very real problems people across the country face everyday – they should be at the centre of the political conversation.