Nearly 1m young people out of work

I understand, I have worked with children who have special needs and Dad feel sad that they are ignored once past school age. Surely that's why we need the able ones to be in work so that we can pay for programmes post 18 which would aid them to do som useful work too.

Can we use this as evidence that you haven’t applied for a job in the last 5-10 years?

Also , we’re conveniently forgetting the other side. The nearly one million, is only approximately 13% of people in that age group. 87% , many more millions , are in employment and education. But somehow, we’re focusing on the small number to paint a whole generation as lazy, feckless and on the dole.

That’s what people don’t see or want to see. There are jobs out there, great! But there are also a lot of people applying for the same jobs.

Last room in a shared property I saw was £700.
It explains all the HMO popping up everywhere.

I've no idea how they could legally do this without stopping the standard element for those living elsewhere too. It would be blatant discrimination. You can't expect parents ( many solely reliant on benefits themselves) to fund adult offspring.

True but the tech and interview process is more in tune to gen Z. Older generations have had to adapt to new somewhat pretentious processes.

The whole thing has got so bad that the government need to do some radical things, like was done in the 80s, i.e. YTS for school leavers, ETS/JTS for mature unemployed, grants for unemployed to help start self employment, etc.w

Hilarious. Obviously you've never had to apply online for a job recently! Most organisations use third parties/agencies, and use very convoluted application processes. It's certainly nothing like simply uploading your CV! Some take hours as they force you to enter every single qualification separately, i.e. input fields for date, exam board, subject and result for every qualification. Same "info in separate boxes" for each past employment, hobby, voluntary activity, etc. Then when you get through the core data sections, there are often "aptitude" tests, i.e. multiple choice questions etc. Some even have online tasks like games - such as one similar to "The Cube" where you have to press a key exactly the moment the cursor hits a particular item on the screen - which is impossible to do - the "test" is to see how many times you try before you give up, so a test of patience/resilience. It can take a few hours before you even get past the initial stages before you move onto the online/remote interview/live answers stages.

It really is terrible, my ds has just got his first art time job and this is after several months of trying, excellent exam results and a lot of extra curricular volunteering / hobbies as well as my encouragement ...I could not believe how much time and effort was needed and I really now have some understanding of why there are so many jobless young people out there, there needs to be incentives to employ young people, for all our futures.

Alot has changed in 40+ years.

It's very easy to apply for jobs nowadays. You just click. It might be better if we went back to the old way of filling in application forms by hand, in order to filter out candidates who can't be bothered.

There was a 'shitty job' (washing up in a pub kitchen for a few hours a week) advertised near us recently. Ideal for a young person you might think. No need for any experience, just need to be prepared to work hard and be reliable, great starter job etc etc.

56 people applied.

Including much older people with lots of experience who were just desperate for a job, any job, any shitty job.

56 applicants for one shitty job.

It's bonkers.

Can a 39 year old with a huge career gap apply?

Asking for a me friend.

How do you know no one is applying for them? People get shitty jobs every single day. The problem at the moment is that for those two jobs you might have 10/20 candidates.

There’s a difference between jobs being advertised and there being enough jobs to go round. If competition is high , no one is going to hire the 16/19/20 yo with no experience are they? Never mind the whole 0 hours contract scandal.

Even if you think about retail, and supermarkets, self checkouts mean far fewer jobs available (and one person - probably on min wage- being pulled in 10 directions to help each person having an issue)
More pubs and restaurants have apps to order food = less waiting staff

I passed 2 places within a few hundred yards with help wanted signs up - get a shitty job anything because it’s far easier to get work when you are in work.

and why is this so?

Not because Labor increased NMW for said youngsters, NI for employers, business rates for businesses and introduced Employment Rights bill making it super hard to fire employees? Let's think who's hit hardest? High tech/Law/banking? or retail and hospitality who are traditionally first jobs for many youngsters?

Why did Labor do this? right, to feed unions and ever growing welfare.

There are 'plenty of jobs' being advertised where we live, too. Lots of pubs, shops, cafes, garden centres, sports/activity centres etc that all advertise jobs and employ youngsters.

The problem is that there are quite literally hundreds of applications for every job. So yes, for each job vacancy (assuming it's actually a real job vacancy) there will be one lucky person who will get a job. But the other 499 won't. And so on and so on.

The reality is that there might be 'plenty of jobs' but there are far more people wanting jobs than there are jobs to go around.

It where I live, no and there are plenty of jobs being advertised here too.

I heard rumours that some MPs want to stop UC to youngsters living at home.

Did you not see the recent report that we currently have the historical lowest ever number of graduate job vacancies?

Have you not noticed all the empty shops, pubs, guest houses etc - the kind of place that used to take on youngsters whilst at school/college which was often their first experience of the working life?

Difficult when you have a benefits system that says the opposite!

The number of job vacancies in the UK has tumbled to the lowest level in five years, research suggests, falling to levels not seen since the pandemic.
The number of jobs being advertised slid by 3% in January to 695,000, according to the job search site Adzuna, marking the first time advertised vacancies have dropped below 700,000 since January 2021.
Graduate jobs fell below 10,000 for the first time since Adzuna began tracking this in 2016.

‘It’s soul-crushing’: young people battle to find any work in bleak jobs market
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The research comes days after official figures showed unemployment in the UK had risen to a five-year high of 5.2%, at a time when wage growth is slowing and concerns are increasing that young people are bearing the brunt of the slowdown in hiring.

The fall in the number of vacancies marked a continuation in the downward trend seen during late 2025 and showed a 16% slide compared with last January and a near-20% fall since six months earlier.
It highlights how sharply job opportunities have shrunk since mid-2025, as employers have reined in their hiring in the face of increases in national insurance contributions and the minimum wage announced by Rachel Reeves in her last two budgets.
The extra cost of labour for business also comes as some companies are prioritising investment in automation and artificial intelligence tools rather than recruitment.
This trend has particularly affected young jobseekers, at a time when unemployment among 18- to 24-year-olds rose to 14% in the final three months of 2025, the highest rate in five years, or nearly 11 excluding the pandemic, adding to concerns that Britain is slipping down the global youth employment league table.