Fairness and future generations.
| Author | Nandy, Lisa |
| Position | Commentary |
One of the most shocking aspects of the new Coalition's first Budget was the sheer scale of the cuts affecting the young. Much has rightly been made of the impact of the budget on women, but children and young people were also amongst the big losers.
Among the announcements were an end to Child Trust Funds, the scrapping of plans to offer free school meals to half a million families on low incomes, and restrictions on Sure Start. Planned new schools under the Building Schools for the Future programme have been axed, fewer families will receive Child Tax Credits, and in the pipeline are changes to higher education that are widely expected to make it harder for many children who are now of school age to get to university. Despite the mooting of a graduate tax by business secretary Vince Cable, unions like the University and College Union (UCU) remain deeply sceptical about the government's plans.
Children are not the only losers; young people have also lost out in a very immediate way. With the demise of the Future Jobs Fund and Working Neighbourhoods Renewal Fund the guarantee of a lasting, paid job has disappeared for those young people who were expecting to start their apprenticeships as soon as this September. These are just a handful of examples of ways in which children and young people have already been hit hard.
The costs of unemployment
Political argument has so far focused on whether children and young people should have shouldered such a heavy burden of the cutbacks, yet very little debate has taken place about whether the cuts were necessary at all. The Coalition argues that the breathtaking scale of the cuts are necessary to get the nation's deficit under control, yet leading economists rightly point out that the only way out of a deficit this size is to invest (Blanchflower, 2009). As the economist Michael Burke sets out compellingly, the evidence from history is that fiscal policy is crucial in order to create economic growth (Burke, 2010). He argues convincingly that we ignore the lessons of the Great Depression at our peril.
In this context the Coalition's cuts, which directly impact a whole generation of young people, are extremely short-sighted. Cameron, Osborne, Clegg and Cable's measure of success is to reduce the deficit--seemingly at all costs. They are right to aim for deficit reduction as an ultimate goal; Labour's approach would have done just that. But these cuts will not meet that aim.
We have seen before what happens when, during a recession, young people are not given sufficient help to find work after finishing school, college or university. In the 1980s and 1990s, in my Wigan constituency and many more others like it, young people left education to find there were few jobs available to them. Unemployment, and consequently the welfare bill, skyrocketed (Chantrill, 2009) and the longer young people languished on benefits, the less likely they became to ever find work (Machin and Manning, 1998).
New Labour inherited this mess in 1997 and made tackling youth unemployment one of its first priorities. It had some success in getting young people into education, work and training but also...
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