How the Chancellor can back the grafters and get young people into employment - Sarah Todd
A week today and a lad who spent his childhood growing up in Yorkshire will be delivering his first budget. Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey was born in Wakefield but the family moved around a lot because of his father’s work with the prison service.
They were at Rosedale - up on the moors - for a while, where he has reminisced about the heavy snowfall stopping the school bus getting through and his first job washing pots and glasses at the village pub, the Milburn Arms.
The family also spent some time in Thornton Dale, with the young Master Healey leaving the local secondary school for the - shock horror - sixth form at fee-paying public school St Peter’s in York.
What an opportunity, an icing on the cake of his education that catapulted him on to Cambridge University where he studied for a degree in social and political science.
Parents paying for their children’s A level education used to be a well-worn path for those of more modest means but, since Mr Healey’s predecessor put VAT onto school fees, the number of children attending independent schools has fallen by around 30,000, with over 100 schools actually ringing the bell for the last time as a result of no longer being able to balance the books.
Here’s hoping our Chancellor will reflect on how the education he enjoyed has been pushed out of the reach of so many families by his party’s politics of envy.
It would also be sensible to take a minute to reflect on those little brown envelopes that would have been left on the bar for his pot washing shifts. That sense of pride and the feeling of having earned his own money to spend, maybe on a record or going to see a film at the cinema. Or saving to buy a car.
Such starter jobs as Mr Healey benefitted from have become incredibly rare for teenagers due to strict council registration and insurance regulations, minimum wages and so on. The National Minimum Wage for under-18s has jumped by roughly 73 per cent over a five-year span which, coupled with strangleholds like not being able to work past 7pm, leaves many youngsters on the scrap heap before they have even started.
Our new Prime Minister can flutter his eyelashes all he wants and look sad about the almost million people aged 16 to 24 known as Neets (not in education, employment or training) but it’s too late to try and solve the problem when they are at this age.
Many will have parents and even grandparents who have never done a day’s work in their lives; it’s been the gravy train of getting benefits for them.
There is no scientific proof for this, but surely our cashless society is also to blame?
That feeling that the Chancellor and others of his generation would get from his little bit of cash from the village pub is no longer experienced by so many. That pride in doing work and coming away with some money to spend and knowing that when it’s gone that’s it until next week’s shift.
What we need is a fundamental change in our country’s relationship with money. It should be a physical thing; earned and respected. It’s not an entitlement.
People with Oxbridge educations like Mr Healey could doubtless explain much better, but benefits arriving like magic into people’s bank accounts so they can go ping, ping, ping with a card and not actually appreciate the true value of what us taxpayers - not the government - are providing has been an accident waiting to happen for a very long time.
Talking of card payments, a village pub, not unlike the one where Mr Healey worked, was visited at the weekend. On the back of the door was a notice urging customers to pay cash, as transaction fees were costing the business around £4,000 a year.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch made a brave stab with her pre-loaded benefit cards for claimants idea and there is something in it. Over in the United States of America there are some sensible sounding voucher systems in place for food, housing and suchlike, very much marketed as temporary assistance for needy families, a pathway to work, rather than our silly society’s lifestyle choice.
To finish with one more thought for the incumbent of 11 Downing Street. Remember all the small business owners’ children you grew up with back in rural North Yorkshire?
Plumbers, publicans, joiners, hairdressers, electricians, builders, butchers and bakers. There are some strong rumours of a fresh tax raid that could almost double the cost of passing companies from parents to their children. Time to back grafters, not grabbers.