Young, jobless, broke: today's lost generation
Unable to buy their own home, saddled with student debt and struggling to find work, the class of 2009 could have their lives scarred for years by the credit crunch
- The Observer, Sunday 21 June 2009
- Article history
Photograph: Christopher Thomond
Back in the carefree days of the Noughties boom, Britain's youngsters were swept along by the buy-now-pay-later culture embraced by consumers up and down the country. During a decade of near-full employment, many skipped nimbly from one job - and one credit card - to another, and rainy days were such a distant memory that they hardly seemed worth saving for.
But with the supply of cheap credit drying up and a generation of school and university leavers about to flood the recession-hit job market, thousands of young people with no memory of the early 1990s recession are shocked into the realisation that the world of 2009 is very different.
Katie Orme, 19, who lives in Birmingham, says she has decided never to get a credit card after seeing the problems that her parents and 22-year-old sister have had with debt - just one of the hard lessons that she has had to learn.
Orme finished her A-levels a year ago, and has been searching for a job - and living at home with her parents - ever since. She has had to sign on to support herself and is now on a 12-week internship at the Prince's Trust to improve her CV. The trust says that the number of calls from anxious people such as Orme has shot up by 50% over six months.
"It's so hard to get a job at the moment," she says, "it's better to go and get more qualifications so when more jobs are available you will be better suited."
She is far from alone in trimming her expectations to fit a credit-crunched world: many youngsters who have seen nothing like the current turmoil have been shocked into changing their outlook. A recent survey by Post Office financial services found that most 16- to 24-year-olds believe that it will take a decade for their living standards to return to pre-crisis levels - and almost half have been jolted into cutting back their use of credit cards.
The number of under-25s out of work and claiming jobseeker's allowance has increased by more than 200,000, to 456,000, over the past year, according to the latest government figures, released last week. On the wider labour market survey measure, an alarming 18.3% of 16- to 25-year-olds are unemployed.
Brendan Barber, the TUC general secretary, says: "Youth unemployment is at its highest rate for 15 years. Unemployment leaves a permanent scar on young people's lives and the government must do all it can to stop joblessness blighting another generation."
David Blanchflower, the labour market expert who recently stepped down from the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, says that even short periods of unemployment can have a long-term "scarring" effect, affecting people's job prospects for many years.
"It's a bit like male metalworkers from Sheffield in the 1980s - it continues for ever," he says. He believes unemployment among the young has become a "national crisis" and has lobbied Gordon Brown to act. "This is going to be the biggest issue in the next election. The danger is that we have a lost generation."
And, unlike the many thousands of manufacturing lay-offs during the 1980s recessions, he says, a wide swathe of social groups will be hit this time, from working-class school leavers to middle-class students. "It's a call to arms for their parents and their grandparents," he says. "We need to get all parties together and say, what are we going to do about this?"
David Willetts, the Conservative shadow skills secretary, is demanding public funding for young people chucked off apprenticeships by cash-strapped firms, and extra places at further education and in postgraduate training, to ease the "pressure points" caused by the recession. "The risk is that young people find themselves on the dole for months, if not years, and in the long run, their life-time earnings are depressed," he says.
Joe Phillips, who is 24, followed in the footsteps of tens of thousands of other graduates and spent time travelling abroad. "I didn't see it as a frantic rush to get on the career path," he says.
However, when he moved to London in September 2008 to try to find a job in the media, he regretted his decision not to enter the jobs market as soon as he had graduated.
"I struggled to find any paid work," he says. "I wanted to do communications for a charity but ended up doing a free internship and then a low-paid job." During this period, he had to sleep on friends' sofas and at his sister's flat to make ends meet. At one point, things were so bad he had to move back to the West Midlands to live with his parents.
He has now returned to London, filling a temporary job at the Parkinson's Disease Society which he hopes will be made permanent - but he is acutely aware that nothing is certain in the current climate.
Gerwyn Davies, public policy adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), believes that the job situation facing today's young people is worse than any generation has seen for decades.
"It's a very difficult pill for young people to swallow," he says. "We already have a situation where one in six young people are unemployed. Unfortunately, this situation is going to worsen."
He points out that they will have to compete against a growing pool of more experienced workers who have lost their jobs: "They will have qualifications, but won't have the same work experience as other people coming on to the claimant count."
A recent report by the CIPD revealed that nearly half of the employers it surveyed were not planning to recruit school leavers or graduates this summer. For many young adults hit by the downturn, who are relying on the generosity of parents or claiming state benefits, the normal process of growing up has been delayed: 35 is the new 25.
While many who came of age in the 1990s were able to buy a home with a 95% or 100% mortgage and reap the windfall as it tripled in value - or, for the luckiest, stroll into a job in the City and join the ranks of the super-rich - today the concerns of many are the more prosaic ones of finding work and earning enough to pay the bills.
Phillips says there is a big difference between young people 10 years ago and his contemporaries: "We have different priorities. I'm just trying to pin down a permanent job and pay the rent. Buying a house and starting a family seems like a distant thing."
Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, fears that graduates emerging from university this year will fare even worse than Philips and his cohorts. He calls the Class of 2009 "generation crunch".
"They're the first to pay top-up tuition fees of £3,000 a year, and are graduating into the worst labour market for a very long time," he says.
Labour has already announced a number of measures to help: Alistair Darling promised in the budget that young people would be guaranteed a job or training place. However, with cash tight, this promise only applies to those who have already been searching for work for 12 months and Streeting says that's far too long to wait.
"The government needs to look again at the situation facing graduates and what they can do proactively to ensure they are not sitting around becoming depressed and disgruntled because they're unable to get a job," he says.
When top-up tuition fees of up to £3,000 a year were introduced, ministers cited the hefty increase in earning power that a degree brings, but Streeting says that argument looks much weaker in a tough economic climate. The NUS has just launched a campaign to replace the fees by a tax, which would be levied as a percentage of graduates' earnings, hitting the highly-paid hardest. "The current economic climate shows the futility of our funding system for higher education," he adds.
With jobs hard to find, young people are increasingly putting their lives on hold. The National Association of Estate Agents said last week that almost seven out of 10 would-be first-time buyers have now given up hope of ever owning their own home.
Instead of branching out on their own, a growing number of youngsters are sharing rental properties. A recent report by flatshare website SpareRoom.co.uk showed that there were 143,000 more people living in a flat or house share in the UK in May 2009 than in autumn 2007, when the credit crunch first began to make itself felt. The UK population of flatsharers has swelled to 2.8 million as renters abandon living alone to save money during the crisis.
For many, the "bank of mum and dad" is the only one whose doors are still open. In the Post Office survey, almost 60% of 18- to 24-year-olds polled said they were living rent free with their parents.
Paul Mullins, chief executive of National Debtline, says: "Young people face various unique challenges that do not affect other age groups in the same way. Often they have a large amount of student debt and are often looking to move out of home for the first time. Quite often young people are on a low income, they are at the start of their careers so their earning power is not as high as older age groups."
And it's not just spending habits that have changed: Orme says that the credit crunch has forced her to put other key life decisions on hold as well. "I can't hold down a relationship or look after a child with no money," she says. "There's no point in bringing a child into the world if you haven't got the money to look after it."
Even for those who have managed to find a job, recession has made things more tricky. "Unless something changes dramatically, I can't see myself doing all three," Joanna Williams, who is 25, says of buying a house, getting married and having a baby. "I know people who have chosen to have a baby and not get married because it's too expensive to do both."
She believes that she will never be able to get a foot on the property ladder: "I remember when I was leaving school I was told I wouldn't own a house because they were too expensive, and now I think that it will never happen because of mortgages. If you want a house by 30, it would be something that you would have to sacrifice everything else for."."
She believes that the tradition of parents helping their children financially with weddings and buying houses is becoming less common as recession bites. "A lot of us would be reluctant to ask our parents for help because we don't know how stable their finances are." Williams has been working as a PA for a broadcasting company for a year and would like to move on, but the recession has made her fear taking risks to pursue her dream career.
"One of the things is that my job is stable and it's a continuing contract, but because of the way things are it makes me reluctant to move on because I am lucky to have a job. I don't want to take any risks."
There have been some tentative signs of green shoots in the UK over recent weeks and some economists have bravely begun to suggest that we may be at the end of the beginning.
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