How younger generations are being left adrift without purpose - David Behrens

Adulthood, when I entered it (and there are those who wonder if I ever did) brought with it a number of certainties: a job that would be there for life if you wanted it, a pension at the end of it and house and a mortgage in between. A person of modest ambition could see their whole life mapped out for them.

On the map facing young people now, too many of the roads lead to despair. That’s the only conclusion to be drawn from the news that a quarter of them are thinking of quitting work because it’s incompatible with their mental health.

Instead they propose relying on benefits because the threshold for claiming them is lower than for securing a worthwhile job.

If three-quarters of the adult population were to subsidise the other quarter, the burden on the public purse would be clearly unbearable and that’s why the Government announced this week that it will rewrite the rules. In future, people will no longer be written off as unfit for work; their eligibility will hinge on whether their condition affects their daily routine. So those with severe issues should be protected.

The devil will be in the detail. Whitehall departments are notoriously inept in administrating means-testing policies like this; they hive off the dirty work to subcontractors who become laws unto themselves. We will return to that bureaucratic aspect shortly.

But it’s what the statistics tell us about expectation and entitlement that is most revealing. We seem to have lost sight of the fact that work, for all its drudgery, was what kept us sane. It didn’t stand in the way of our wellbeing; it enhanced it by giving us security, money in the bank and a social life. The prospect of losing your job was as fearful as being sent to prison.

And, yes, some jobs were better than others. But almost any job was better than none; that was ingrained in us by parents who’d had it tougher than we ever would.

What has upended those social conventions? Is it resentment towards those of us in the post-war generation who are perceived to have had the best of it? Perhaps it’s what the Health Secretary called the “overdiagnosis” of mental health conditions that might previously have been dismissed as part of life’s normal pattern.

Either way, it is recognisably corrosive and after a year of picking unwise fights with pensioners and farmers, the Government has identified it as a more deserving target.

Yet it won’t be an easy fix, as the Prime Minister perhaps unwittingly acknowledged when he announced another of his flagship reforms to cut red tape in the civil service.

“I can’t in all honesty explain to the British people why they should spend their money on two layers of bureaucracy,” Starmer said by way of justifying his decision to abolish the nebulous administrative body NHS England.

He cited as a curious example a block of flats near Bingley that had been delayed by fears of flying cricket balls from the pavilion next door and the fact that a ‘ball strike assessment’ had not been undertaken by an approved consultant.

This in a single sentence summed up the fault line that runs through all our public services: no matter how many administrators they employ, the work on the ground is nearly always contracted out. ‘Experts’ are called in, sometimes on full-time contracts, to carry out functions too specialised for the staff to do themselves. It’s claimed to be more flexible than hiring better trained staff in the first place but it actually means we’re paying twice for each piece of work even within the same layer of bureaucracy.

That’s what will happen with Starmer’s new benefits assessments as teams of inspectors from outsourcing corporations play judge and jury on whether an applicant is using the benefits system as a safety net or just a crutch.

We saw it when universal credit was introduced 12 years ago: benefit tests for the sick and disabled were outsourced to hated contractors at a cost of more than £700m. DWP staff, it was said, were sitting at their desks, rewarding failure.

There will be more of that unless the red tape reforms precede the benefit tests. But those tests are inevitable if a generation is not to be abandoned to drift without purpose through that other chasm from youth to infirmity.