Liz Kendall gave a speech this morning in which she promised to ‘build a better future’ for young people, with better mental health support and careers advice in schools. Sounds pretty motherhood-and-apple-pie from the shadow work and pensions secretary, but what’s getting more attention is that she also said there would be ‘no option of a life on benefits’ for people who can work.
This is interesting for two reasons. One is that the Labour party has really struggled over the past decade with conditionality in the benefits system, and more widely with the idea that it should tell people they should be in work. But that is exactly what Kendall said today. She told a Demos event:
This is our commitment to young people. We value you. You are important. We will invest in you and help you build a better future, with all the chances and choices this brings. But in return for these new opportunities, you will have a responsibility to take up the work or training that’s on offer. Under our changed Labour party, if you can work there should be no option of a life on benefits. Not just because the British people believe rights should go hand in hand with responsibilities. But because being unemployed or lacking basic qualifications when you’re young can harm your job prospects and wages for the rest of your life.
Kendall is drawing on recent work from the Resolution Foundation which pointed to young people being more likely to be out of work due to ill-health than those in their early 40s. This study found that one in three people reported symptoms suggesting they have a common mental health disorder like depression, anxiety or bipolar, and that between 2018 and 2022, one in five 18-24 year olds with mental health problems were workless.
The question should surely be how to help young people manage a healthy range of emotions better
The factors behind this are quite complex, and a lot of the commentary has overlooked that the most disadvantaged were those without degrees (one in three non-graduates with those reported symptoms were workless, compared to 17 per cent of graduates). There may well be a big element of diagnostic creep here too, even among those who have been seen by a doctor and described as having an illness: it isn’t uncommon, for instance, for people to be prescribed anti-depressants when bereaved.
There is a pathologising of normal emotions and reactions that appears to be particularly prevalent amongst young people, but the question should surely be how to help them manage a healthy range of emotions better so that they can face the world of work properly. Given child and adolescent mental health services are so stretched that even those with extremely serious and threatening illnesses have to wait months and travel hundreds of miles for treatment, it’s hardly a surprise that we are seeing a mental health crisis leading to worklessness among young people. The sick people aren’t getting treated, and the healthy but struggling cohort have had little help in adjusting to the adult world and gaining an understanding of what is healthy. Lockdown made that even harder as many young people have even less of an idea of what normal life is like: something taken from them by adults who’d already aged well beyond those formative years.
Presumably that’s why Kendall included in her speech a promise of specialist mental health support in every school and walk-in access in every community alongside the announcements on careers advisers, technical skills training and so on. But it’s not clear what she means when she says ‘no option’: she did not go into details on the sort of conditionality she would introduce into the system to remove that option. Would there be sanctions for those who refused to look for work or take up the other training options Kendall has outlined? Or would full conditionality only enter the system when those opportunities and support were properly available: mental health support in schools and walk-in access are huge asks given how constrained the services are currently, and it will be impossible to staff and fund them fully straight away.
Getting people back into work is something all politicians are in favour of. But conditionality is the issue that Labour has long struggled with, and one that the party will likely find quite painful to confront if it finds itself in government later this year.
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