Disclaimer: I don't live in the UK so don't know exactly what benefits there are, but:
Surely if you make continued CB/CTC after 16/17 and university entrance and JS allowance/whatever unemployment benefit is called now dependent on the adolescent attending National Service/Community Service in whatever form (military/community/trade apprenticeship/even some form of VSO) for a blanket period across society then you will have access to a fairly wide cross section of society.
And yes I do believe this period of service should be waged in some form.
I do believe there is a need for social programes in disadvantaged areas but making the recipient into a kind of eternal "client" figure with only "rights" and never any "responsibilities" then you are creating an entitlement culture. You are also creating a passivity whereby the client morphs into a kind of "patient" who is subordinate to the "doctors" of society.
Always being the recipient of programmes with no chance of/requirement for input must breed lethargy.
yes of course implementing this kind of a scheme will be expensive but prison/ these riots/ community schemes/bankers/ yes and even creating jobs are all expensive.
And surely the creation of a scheme like this would create jobs and bring experts back into their fields because you cannot let large groups of clueless young people loose on unsuspecting kids/old people/expensive army equipment/industrial equipment without large numbers of experts to support and educate them.
But there has to be a will across the more fortunate/skilled/experienced/simply older swathes of society to make it work. People upthread have said: "My kids don't need it thank you very much" and "Service personnel would not want to work alongside unskilled conscripts". But it is this kind of attitude that "it's not my problem, let someone else deal with it" that creates the stratification of society. If it was an integral part of life across the board, like preschool education, school, further education and work then there would be no stigma, no option. In every job you get school leavers, people fresh out of college/university, shirkers and somebody has to train them up, so this would be another element of that process.
And finally, yes I do realise that this is a utopian view and that the reality is much more complicated, less ideal and far harder to implement, but every project/scheme/system has to have a principle on which it is based and the nitty-gritty worked out from there.
And now watch MN eat my essay...