Helen Whately: Labour’s current policies are damaging all our children’s chances

Helen Whately is Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and is the MP for Faversham and Mid Kent.

Last week thousands of teenagers held their breath as they opened their A-level results emails. Many will head off with high hopes to university or start apprenticeships. Some will set out to get their first job.

This new generation is brilliant and full of promise. They are extraordinarily creative and connected.

They could and should do amazing things.

For their own sakes, I want them to. For the sake of all of us further on in life, we need them to. In the years ahead, the bills for our pensions and healthcare are going to mount up (and too few of us are saving enough to cover the cost).

What they do depends on them, of course, but also on the opportunities our country gives them.

But we have a government seemingly intent on destroying those opportunities. They are driving away wealth creators, punishing businesses and killing the jobs market for young people with tax and regulation.

Don’t just take my word for it. Last week saw the latest Government stats release for benefits and employment data.

The Express splashed on the bad news that the number of people on benefits hit 8 million. Up by a million since Labour took office.

The employment data for young people got less attention but is just as serious. The number of under 25s on payrolls was down by 112,000 and 25s-34s were down by around 105,000. Taken together, over 200,000 fewer under 34s are in jobs.

A significant number will have signed on for benefits, contributing to that 8 million claimants figure. Of whom around half have no requirement to work or take any steps to prepare for work. That means a life on benefits. Given the Government has made a big thing about their plan to end NEETs, the fact that this data is going in the wrong direction is a damning failure.

Worst still, this is the inevitable consequence of the policy choices the Government has made. They put up taxes (NI) for employers in a way that made lower cost employees much more expensive to employ. That was obviously going to hit job opportunities for young people.

Kate Nicholls (of UK Hospitality) has spelt this out loud and clear to the Government, along with any number of businesses in that sector.

They have brought forward legislation – the ‘employment rights bill’ – that will make it harder to show an employee the door if things aren’t working out. That means businesses are less likely to take a risk on a young person, without a track record from previous jobs.

And then there’s AI. I don’t blame the Government for that. But Ministers must know its growing impact on entry-level jobs for many graduate professions. For months if not years, Finance Directors have been saying to HR Directors; ‘can that job be done by AI instead of a human?’

When you’re in Government a lot gets in the way of the things you want to do. There might be a pandemic, or a war, for instance. But when the Government’s own policies get in the way, that is sheer incompetence.

I wish it were not so. Among those teenagers getting their A-level results were many hundreds of my own constituents. I want them to have exciting doors opening for them. And in the next few years, I have three children of my own leaving school. I have skin in the game.

I want there to be thousands of amazing new jobs and careers for this generation of bold and creative young people. I want us to have a Government which understands, as all Conservatives do, that those opportunities depend on business leaders, entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists and all manner of people outside the scope of the public sector. That backing them to succeed is not only the best way but the only way.

The Government’s failure to get a grip on the benefits bill is a disaster for our economy. Their failure to reform welfare is a desperate waste of the talents of people who will end up claiming rather than working.

But their destruction of the opportunities for thousands of young people because they have chosen to tax and regulate young people’s jobs out of existence is arguably the worst of these three sins.

For the sake of this new generation of brilliant young people they must change course – or the next election cannot come soon enough.