The Government's new Youth Contract: what do you think?

[HelenMumsnet]

Hello.

You may have seen/heard that Nick Clegg has announced today a £1billion Youth Contract to tackle youth unemployment.

The Youth Contract includes, among other things, subsidised work and training placements, and a programme to help the most disengaged 16 and 17-year-olds get back to school or college, onto an apprenticeship or into a job with training. You can read more about it here.

The Cabinet Office has just been in touch with us at MNHQ to ask us what Mumsnetters think about these plans. So we've said we'll start a thread to find out.

Please do tell!

Depends. Underemployment is a known problem for a country.

So though I've cleaned toilets for a living while studying or travelling, it's pretty hard to argue toilet-cleaning is a now good use of my expensively acquired shortage skills.

Current minimum wage rate:

£6.08 - the main rate for workers aged 21 and over 
£4.98 - the 18-20 rate
£3.68 - the 16-17 rate for workers above school leaving age but under 18
£2.60 - the apprentice rate, for apprentices under 19 or 19 or over and in the first year of their apprenticeship

So taking the rate applicible to my daughter (£4.98) based on 36 hours a week that approximately £777 per month before tax so what, about £650 a month take home? She pays £450 per month rent which assuming wouldnt be paid by HB if she is working fulltime so it doesnt leave much for bills and transport to/from work let alone food.

Sorry had to rush last post - I wanted to add that it doesnt really act as much of an incentive (if it is minimum wage) for employers to keep people on if they can just let them go and take on other youths on the scheme and have such low outgoings.

exactly stubbornstains! i can't see how you can do this without offering them at least some basic employment rights that protect them from mistreatment and abuses of the system. and to have those you need infrastructure and resources - which are where?

and yes exactly jaxv - the only way it works is if these youngsters are living at home and being subsidised by mum and dad who are also struggling in a recession.

no decent parent is going to see their adult child homeless but how long realistically can we ask parents to support their children (we're looking at mid twenties with this scheme) whilst they're meant to be saving for their retirement with their reduced pensions and the crumbling of the welfare state?

it's not realistic is it? not long term. it may jiggle the figures for a bit and win or lose some positions in the poles for the next election but it isn't actually a sustainable way for us to live our lives.

if you're fretting about youngsters opportunities and youth unemployment and making HE too expensive for them to access at the same time and doing nothing to create real jobs and taking away benefits simultaneously how is that EVER going to add up?

this way madness...

does that mean that whilst avoiding 'borrowing' money on the hardship rhetoric that they're actually printing money and devaluing any money that way instead?

god it's madness isn't it?

the more you get to know about economics and politics the more you wish there was a way to jump ship or cry mutiny and get the captains walking the plank with their ill gotten gains left on board.

sorry - last post was to betelguese - excuse tirade.

Swallowed, it's scares the crap out of you doesn't it?

Afaik a minimum waged full time job for an 18+ year old would just about cover the 3rd for you 3rd for me and 3rd for saving system so parents might be happy to keep offspring at home if they contribute in this way.

Not sure if an 18+ on JSA is allowed any housing benefit if the live with parents so I would have thought they would be glad to rent their own place and in this case cost alot more in benefits but not sure how it all works.

My soon to be adult child will be going to uni, fingers crossed, but will be home in the hols and even though I work full-time in a reasonable paid employment I have said that I will struggle with the food bill once cb and ctc ends. Hopefully mine will work in the hols and I will need a small contribution, which I actually feel embarrassed about.

but you've gotta survive adamschic - and for single parents like us the pressure is even greater.

i have to face the fact that i, despite being very academic myself and well qualified and a big believer in education, will probably have to advise my son who so far seems very able to not go to university because the debts accrued do not bear any relation to earning potential afterwards. unless he later on knows something he really wants to do and has clear job prospects that he can do a professional degree for or if he can later afford to study part time for more academic stuff it will be absolutely counterproductive.

times have changed rapidly - my parents generation were pushing everyone to get good qualifications and go to uni and it would all be worth it. we did or alternatively found plentiful low level but available work and rented rooms in shared houses and spent a few years getting ourselves together and working out what we wanted to do whilst earning enough money to get by with a basic lifestyle and accommodation but it was fine - second hand sofas with throws over the top etc.

a generation before my dad tells me you could walk out of your job on friday lunchtime because your boss was a pig or you were sick of it and walk into a new job on monday and if you were willing to work you'd get by.

now? it's all looking rather grim. hasn't taken long to fuck up everything totally has it?

my context is that i was coming of age during the last big recession watching people being thrown out of lifelong jobs with pitiful redundancy packages, shortfall endemnity mortgages everywhere and fraudulent pension schemes that they'd faithfully paid into for 30years only to find they'd have been better off sticking in the building society for all that time.

so erm, yes. excuse me if i'm a little cynical

i'm not sure what the working classes have to believe in now tbh - they can't even buy the dream that if they can get their kids to do well at school they can go to university and have a better chance at life.

it is utterly grim and i'm not at all surprised we're experiencing sections of society feeling totally and utterly disenfranchised. and i live in central/south east england. god knows how it feels in one of the ex industrial towns that were sold down the river in the north in the last recession/tory scheming session.

Swallowed, I know exactly what you mean. Hopefully mine will get into a vocational based degree and it will be worth the debt.

When I was a young worker, I worked all the hours god sent for a low wage. The jobs I did as a student, finding my feet, are still there but filled with eastern europeans in the main as native workers don't want to do them as they would be working for a quid an hour. Really annoys me this attitude and the benefit system fueling it.

still going on i'm afraid but this thread is stuck in my head.

what i would love to see is groups of young people with a facilitator being given a very frugal budget to run an oap coffee morning/social support service. or a nursery rhyme time group at a library or whatever. some would develop great hospitality skills and find strengths there, some would turn out to have a good organisational streak, others would be fab at the media side promoting the event and producing posters/literature etc. they'd have a genuine product and actually be providing something for the community and gaining a sense of contribution with genuine positive feedback of smiling faces-successful events etc and people would be profitting not financially but in terms of quality of life and community building.

this realistically can't come from a government scheme but could come from accepting ok there are no jobs for these kids and they are on benefits - let's give them six months leeway where if they can show they're involved in something we won't threaten them with benefit loss because sadly we can't give them paid employment anyway. none of this bullshit rhetoric about getting them back into non existent jobs.

it would be compassionate and socially responsible to give these kids some leeway to find their feet and develop their skills and self esteem in a time where society has very little to offer them in terms of capitalist incentives. why not see them as a gift to the community to be harnassed rather than treat them like little drains on society who must be brought into a make believe line?

promise to step away from thread now but i'm really not fluffy sob story bleeding heart fool. i just honestly believe we are on a very, very mistaken trajectory that we need to pull back from rather than keeping on plunging in deeper. we should learn something from the riots and that's not that if we just make the little shits feel even smaller and crapier it'll all be ok.

i don't think anyone is working for a quid an hour adams but i do think that even those jobs we did as kids and students (waitressing, bar work, random hospitality venues and events, etc) are thin on the ground because people further up the food chain are desperate for work too along with all the single mum's who have to work around childcare and the couples doing split shift stuff around each to not have to pay childcare etc.

and i really believe that the cost of living has changed hugely even since i was an out of home teenager (and i'm only 36).

and then there's accommodation - i don't think there is the huge market of rented multiple occupant housing there was when i was younger where 5 young people could live together and share the gas meter feeding. that housing issue is partly to do with immigration around here but it's no ones fault in terms of the tenants.

we do need people to be moving on to the next stage of work/housing/retiring etc to keep making room for those to come up under them and the system has got stuck in a way. and then you think hmm extending retirement age??? it's all madness.

last post - how do you get into politics? maybe that'd get me back into work and use up this grrr and need to influence things.

I meant that they work out that if they work 35 hours a week they are only better off by £50 a week, factor in travel, lunch, clothes/uniform then the net gain can be £1 an hour.

Swallowed, look into it. I'm sure you would do very well .

cat64, I can't work out exactly what's being proposed here, but currently there are "work experience placements" paid only with dole. And penalised with removal of benefits if the person does not complete, or indeed goes to the loo (see other thread).

It all sounds a mishmash on the BBC article, but some parts could be an expansion of work-for-dole.

Oh just remembered this is a sticky thread so will add to posters who were wondering how they would find the money for this and mentioning printing it. No-way, we don't need to print the money because it was always there. It's been filtered off from our young people anyway but they hoped to spend some on the 'deficit' and some on what they hell they wanted. Only now they have realised that things are looking bad so are trying to right a few wrongs.

Hope people realise that out of all the money we earn, taxes, be it income tax, council tax, fuel/alcohol/tobacco duties, VAT. We pay back about 65% of our earnings in the tax and we deserve for our children to have a decent education and decent health and social services.

yeah it's really not cap in hand begging to the manor house to let our children have bread scenario adams no matter how it's painted.

what they're trying to do though is give those who pay taxes the impression that all of their labour is going to keep feckless single mum's, layabouts, hoodies, scrounging old folks in big council houses laughing it up on wide screen tv and smack.

ever so sadly it appears to be working with a lot of people on here

Yes and for anyone who doesn't realise this people on benefits pay taxes too.