INSIDER VIEW: Good intentions pave the road to NEET hell

For those that still follow the news, you’d have probably heard yesterday that latest official data indicates that 981,000 people aged 16–24 were not in education, employment or training between April and June of this year. 

This number of NEETs (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) is 3% up on the same period last year, and represents a truly mind-boggling chunk of the population.

Whichever side of the political spectrum you sit on, there must surely be a broad consensus that this is a massive issue that costs everyone and should be fixed — or, at least, improved upon — urgently.

Where politics may come into play, and therefore where consensus could go out of the window, is on the issue of how we can go about fixing the problem and whether this is worth the trade-offs.

If we accept that stagnant macroeconomic conditions and specific growth-stifling government intervention on businesses both play a role in the scale of the NEET problem, then a handful of solutions spring to mind.

The government could reduce taxes on businesses (corporation tax and employer National Insurance contributions), but opponents would say that this would impact the already indebted public purse further.

Or it could row back on some of the legislation that it’s introduced regarding employment rights — the rises to the minimum wage, the expansion of day one rights, and the clampdown on low-hours contracts. 

Again, from an economics perspective this would be a no-brainer and would stimulate the economy for relatively low-paid, young workers almost overnight. But the counter-argument would be that we don’t want to return to an economy where young people are treated as disposable assets by greedy corporations. 

The counter to the counter would be that there are no employment rights for the million young people that now don’t have jobs at all. And so the argument can go back and forth indefinitely. Consensus in politics is as rare as a Patek Philippe Grandmaster Chime.

The British Retail Consortium’s chief exec Helen Dickinson is, understandably, on the pro-business side of the argument. “Retail has long played an important role in providing accessible, local, and flexible jobs that provide a first step into employment. 

“But retailers’ ability to offer these jobs is being eroded by new employment reforms. The current Guaranteed Hours proposals will create cost and complexity for responsible businesses instead of targeting the unscrupulous, and risk making flexible, entry-level jobs harder to create. 

“If Government is serious about tackling the NEET crisis, it must not hinder flexible opportunities for the young. Retail stands ready to work with Government to support more young people into work, but this requires employment reforms that don’t confuse flexibility with insecurity.”

It’s difficult to argue with the thrust of her point. Would the people in government who made up a lot of these employment-deterring policies genuinely be happy if every single 16–24 year-old in the UK was a NEET? It sounds like a facetious question, but it’s not meant to be. 

Assuming that politicians of all persuasions are sincere in wanting to improve everyone’s lives — I know many would call this a reckless assumption! — then we have to believe that they wouldn’t be at all happy if the NEET crisis worsened. And, if that’s the case, then we should hope that they might swallow some pride and ideology and work closer with businesses.

Independent of Watch Insider, I genuinely know half a dozen friends who had weekend jobs at a jeweller during their studies. It benefitted both parties and it feels like madness to consign this dynamic to the past in the name of greater rights for the people that are now jobless because of these same rights.

It’s possible to be pro-workers’ rights in a general sense, without making it much more expensive and complex to hire in the first place. That road, which is undoubtedly paved with good intentions, leads to unemployment hell.