Harriet Dolby is President-Elect of the Oxford University Conservative Association, and the most recent and youngest member of the Next Gen Tories executive.
‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ is the question my Grandmother asks annually at Christmastime in order to avoid an awkward silence. I am now almost 20, and for the past fifteen years this has been a constant inquisition, ever since those primary school lessons made us draw out who and what we wanted to be in the future.
If I now look at that class of 33 pupils, an average of four of them would not be in education, employment of training (NEET). Extrapolated out to the UK, this figure rises to 948,000, 12.8% of young people.
That is one in eight 16-24-year-olds who may never work a day in their lives.
It is easy to see that if one becomes accustomed to a life of 9-5 Come Dine with Me and Four-in-a-Bed, then it would be hard to muster the will, confidence and ever-elusive ‘soft skills’ required to hold down a job.
But of course, this comes at a huge financial cost to the state, taxpayer and personal cost to those who are NEET. According to the Minister for Employment in July 2025, there were 768,000 young people on Universal credit. If we assume that each person receives the standard rate of UC, this would sum to over £2.2bn per year; more than half of the Metropolitan Police’s budget each year. A figure that would rise even further when we consider the 383,000 young people on PIP too.
On the international stage, we are an embarrassment, with our youth unemployment (at 15-16 per cent) exceeding the OECD average (of 12 per cent), our Anglophone friends in Australia at 10 per cent and, as my teenage brother would say, we are certainly ‘mogged’ by Germany at just 7 percent. And this discrepancy is only growing with youth unemployment rising by 2 per cent to 16 per cent over just the past year.
Why are we letting this happen and what have we got wrong to get us here?
Fundamentally, Britain has seen a complete subversion of incentives, a welfare state so generous that it is almost nonsensical to work, and an employment system so litigious and so costly that it simply does not make sense for businesses to take on more staff.
Starmer’s government has only exacerbated this problem.
Entrenched in the minds of Labour ministers is seemingly the view that all business owners are Victorian industrialists, willing to sacrifice a few children’s fingers in a machine to earn more for their rapacious selves. If this is the Government’s view of the private sector, it is hardly surprising that virtue-signalling Labourites would want to stand up for the oppressed worker, squash brutal employment practices and ensure that the proletariat are fairly paid.
Yet, the utopia that this idealistic group sought to achieve actually results in less jobs: with job vacancies fallen by almost 10 per cent in the last year. If the government increases national minimum wage and employers’ National Insurance Contributions astronomically, the result is that the cost of employing an 18-year-old on minimum wage has risen by £4,095 per year, between 2024-6.
Why should an employer take the risk on an unskilled, inexperienced worker if thy now cost so much more to employ?
Like the dinosaurs sixty-six million years ago, we are awaiting an incoming implosion, albeit on businesses, through the Employment Rights Bill. From mandating employers to inform their staff as to how to join trade unions; to giving day one rights for workers to sick leave and paternity pay; and allowing unlimited compensation for unfair dismissal cases, this legislation appears to be straight out of a trade union policy meeting. No surprises there.
However, if the Labour government believes they have effectively liberated the proletariat and have squashed the bourgeoisie then why are the young people not working? Why do we have so many on benefits?
Additionally, with mental health problems becoming the new bad back of benefits claimants, the seeking of that cheeky bit of PIP (Personal Independence Payments) on the side is compelling.
Since Covid, the number of young people receiving health-related benefits has soared by more than 50% over the past five years, with four in five of those individuals claiming due to mental health or neurodevelopmental conditions. The pandemic was a difficult time for many people, but the number of people on these benefits is preposterous.
They do not truly help people; it merely parks them in their homes.
Perhaps it is unfair to call these young people on benefits scroungers; rather they are homo economicus. They are making a rational decision, and since the scrapping of the two-child benefit cap there are even more opportunities to profit. Indeed, a couple with three young children on benefits take home the same amount of money as a single person earning £140,000.
At almost £300 per month a child, perhaps it is worth the extra perineal tearing, although I hear it gets better after the second one. This change could even be considered to have a positive business effect, we could even see a return a Mothercare to our highstreets if they started manufacturing bumper five-seater buggies, such opportunists!
This dilemma though is not irreversible, but it will require us to make some uncomfortable decisions. There is a way out though, a radical conservative approach, as Next Gen Tories propose. We would see massive deregulation in employment rights law, cut Employers National Insurance, slash the welfare state, invest in the productive economy, and maybe even lower minimum wage. Crucially our tax system should reward ambitious, aspirational people who want to work hard and contribute to our economy.
But, if Labour politicians can stop jockeying on their rainbow-clad high horses, then perhaps we could see more young people working.
However, if these changes are not made then perhaps, I should just resort to popping out a few children, our replacement ratio is a bit low at the moment anyway.
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