Make National Community Service compulsory

Last month David Cameron called for all 18- to 21-year-olds who have failed to find a job or a place in training to be forced to undertake community work. Under Tory plans those aged between 18 and 21 who have not had a job for six months will be barred from claiming benefit unless they agree to start an apprenticeship or complete community work.

The plan is designed to ensure that the 50,000 young people “most at risk of starting a life on benefits” find that their first contact with the benefit system is a requirement to undertake community work and search for jobs. The claimant will be expected typically to undertake at least 30 hours’ community work a week and 10 hours’ looking for jobs.

On the left, Ed Milliband has promised that a Labour government would also abolish the jobseeker’s allowance for 18-21 year olds. He suggested that benefits, subject to some conditions, would be dependent on undertaking training, rather than community work.

What to do about young people at the margins is clearly exercising our political class, and quietly rightly, too. According to ONS data, there were 954,000 people aged 16-24 NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training), in the third quarter of 2014, 13.1% of people in this age group. This is a statistic that not only represents a terrible waste of talent but is a recipe for trouble in the future.

We seem to be edging slowly towards something deeper and more coherent, which should be positive rather than punitive, and which links work, training and education. The next step should be to consider all young people, not just those at the bottom of the pile and look at introducing a compulsory national community service scheme. And this is a policy that progressives can and should support.

The coalition introduced voluntary National Citizen Service in 2011. It is an excellent idea, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, it does not go far enough. A weakness of all voluntary schemes is that many of the people who would benefit most from a national community service would be excluded. National community service should involve some choice, but should be very difficult to avoid. Compulsory national community service would genuinely offer opportunity for many, even all, not the few.

I wrote for LabourList after the riots in 2011, and made a call for the introduction of a compulsory scheme. Compulsion is not a negative concept. We have to pay our taxes, and parent must ensure that children are in full-time education to the age of 16.

One of the troubles of a certain type of liberal thinking that we have endured for many years is that setting limits is somehow wrong, that we interfere with the ‘rights’ of the individual. The outcomes are certainly not liberal and have failed to understand what civil society actually means and requires. Young people actually need boundaries and they need direction.

We live in an increasingly atomised society. It must also be said that some on the left are partly to blame for this, as they have encouraged identity politics over social cohesion and emphasised our differences over what binds us together in communities. Too many young people have no shared experiences. Well-heeled middle class youths have their gap years to enjoy, before heading off to university, and kids from inner city London or Liverpool stay there. As Jeremy Corbyn pointed out, some of them are so restricted, that they have never even been on the Tube.

This is why I believe there should be a period of between one year and 18 months, where all young people are offered work, receive training, can engage with their peers – including those from different regions and backgrounds – and where there is an element of discipline and respect for authority.

Offering an element of choice within the compulsory framework, would recognise that people have different skills, interests and abilities, and also may have existing obligations – looking after family members, for example.

So, options could include working on environmental projects to clean up public spaces, parks, canal banks, working as hospital porters (an ideal job for aspiring doctors, seeing life at the coalface), or helping to deliver care to the elderly and long-term sick.

One scenario would offer three broad options, based in the local area, elsewhere in the UK, or overseas. Exceptionally talented individuals may have the chance to spend time overseas, rather than permitting gap years abroad to be the exclusive preserve of the middle classes.

Learning that with rights go responsibilities is a fundamental reason to introduce compulsory national community service. This is part of the positive basis for the introduction of such a scheme. And, as a small, but increasing, number of young people appear to be so disengaged from the society they grew up in they, head off to Syria, political concern about citizenship can only increase. These are both excellent reasons for introducing National Citizens Service.

The notion of ‘rights and responsibilities’ is a far more positive concept than that of simple ‘duty’. Surely the opportunities of training, practical qualifications and chances to travel either in the UK or elsewhere more than justify an obligation to ‘serve’ the community, which is, or should be, a good thing in any case.

The wider public is supportive. A YouGov poll in the wake of the 2011 riots showed that 77% backed the concept of a “National citizen service”, as a compulsory period of community service for all young people. And this wasn’t just about older people wanted to get rid of troubled kids – around 67% of 18-24 polled also supported the idea.

National community service should be a common rite of passage shared by all young people. National community service could become a genuine exemplar of the ‘big society’. An open, public debate around the themes of a compulsory national community service programme is urgently needed.