Anna Blackaby City View: Urgent action needed on youth unemployment
Oct 12 2009 by Anna Blackaby, Birmingham Post
The West Midland job market has been hit particularly hard by the recession, thanks in part to the presence of a larger manufacturing base than other UK regions.
But there is another feature of the region which has left the area vulnerable when it comes to the malignant aftermath of the credit crunch – and that is its demographics.
Birmingham is often celebrated as the youngest city in Europe given the fact that 37 per cent of our population is under 24.
But its youth and vitality also mean it has been disproportionately hit by the creeping tide of unemployment, which is weighing down hard on 16 to 24-year-olds living in the city.
This is the week experts are predicting youth unemployment to pass the one million mark and unemployment overall to top 2.5 million – meaning young people will make up a staggering 40 per cent of people out of work.
If those figures aren’t bad enough from a purely economic point of view, we shouldn’t forget the psychological effects on a generation of young people who find it impossible to prise open the doors to jobs at calls centres and shopping malls, let alone on the rapidly-disappearing graduate training schemes.
Labour market expert David Blanchflower – the only member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee to flag up the impact of the credit crunch on unemployment at a time when the Bank of England focused doggedly on inflation – has warned the government should do “anything it can” to stem the rise, including offering to pay young people benefits while on internships.
And spending on tackling youth unemployment is one of just two sacred cows John Cridland, deputy director of the CBI, is urging the government to spare in the inevitable volley of cuts that are coming our way.
The business body wants measures to tackle worklessness among the young and capital spending on infrastructure to be preserved in an otherwise “hard and fast” series of cutbacks it is calling on the government to make.
It is significant that two heavyweights like John Cridland and David Blanchflower are singling out this issue – they know the devastating effect it will have on our future economy.
The psychological impact of being knocked back in your first attempts to enter the world of work, and the implications this has in terms of mental health, community engagement and crime, is something that does not bode well for our future wealth creators.
For both our young people’s sakes and for the sake of the long-term viability of the West Midlands economy, we need to take urgent action on youth unemployment.
Anna Blackaby
