Andrew Griffith is the Shadow Secretary of State for Business and Trade, MP for Arundel and South Downs and a former FTSE100 Finance Director and COO.
You cannot blame young people today for feeling a sense of intergeneration injustice, the consequences of which make them far less likely to be conservatives.
Where to start?
A chronic lack of private housing supply, high marginal tax rates to repay student loans, or inheriting a pro-rata £44,000 share of a national debt to pay for a state largesse you had no choice about. It’s not the first time a generation has felt hard done by, but this time does feel unusually bad.
Now, the frontier has moved to jobs. Specifically, whether the ladder of opportunity and dignity that is real employment in a real job can deliver for current generations.
The challenge for Conservatives amongst younger voters is well known, but sooner or later the party which stands up for the ambitious young against an employment market which is badly failing so many will reap electoral dividends. Even for those more senior in life, worklessness among their younger relatives is a much more tangible indicator of a failing economy than banging on about abstractions like inflation or the gilt yield (important though those are).
The difficulties of securing a good, well-paid job is a crisis in plain sight. Few in Westminster other than Kemi Badenoch, Shadow Welfare Secretary Helen Whately, and I have been talking about it. Perhaps it’s the staggering lack of private sector experience from which Parliament suffers?
Every journey begins with a single step and for many that is – or was – gaining early experience of work with a summer job or weekend shift. Twenty years ago, roughly half of 16–17-year-olds had some kind of job. Today, it’s down to around 1 in 5 and falling fast.
For me, it was making jam donuts and hot cross buns in a Tesco instore bakery, cleaning tennis courts, and later driving a van. Kemi’s fast-food prowess is now well known. Few would imagine these jobs to be the pinnacle of ambition, but they provided a sense of how to go about the workplace, a first taste of independent spending money, and some experience to put down on a CV.
But perhaps most importantly, those summer jobs were something of a right – and a rite of passage – for young people. Something your older brother had, you had, and then your younger sister had, too. Their disappearance, presided over by a generation that itself benefited from climbing the ladder of which these were the first rung, is so very symptomatic of the broken intergenerational compact we now see across Britain.
All parties bear some responsibility for this. Too often politicians with precious little experience outside Westminster preferred to go along with growing the thicket of red tape rather than cutting it. Under Kemi Badenoch’s leadership, the changed Conservative party will not make that mistake.
Last week we unveiled our proposals to ‘Save the Summer Job’. Removing outdated and complex red tape, supporting sectors such as hospitality, retail, and tourism which provide summer and part-time opportunities – and a commitment to lower taxes.
It builds on our previous commitment to repeal all the job destroying measures in Labour’s ‘back to the 1970’s’ Employment Rights Act and our plans to support Britain’s High Streets.
The red tape we propose to scrap is measured and builds on detailed, line-by-line scrutiny. Many of the worst rules date to the EU’s rigid Working Time Directive. Flexibility for 16-17s to take their break when it suits them, rather than being mandated to take it after exactly 4.5 hours is one. The choice to work an extra hour, to midnight, on Fridays and Saturdays or outside of term time is another. We also want to scrap the rules that require them to take two consecutive days off in one go every week – meaning for example that they can’t work alternate days across the Summer.
For under 16s, we want to enable weekend jobs by scrapping the almost Victorian two-hour limit on Sunday work. It dates from a time when Sunday trading hours were much stricter, and it limits what is prime time for many in that age group. None of these are health and safety rules, none would be out of place in competitor countries, and none of them would clash with education or training. Instead, this is common sense Conservatism informed by businesses who tell us they want to give young people the same start which they had in life but cannot make it through the minefield of employment red tape to do so.
Only Conservatives understand that work is a good thing, and that the earlier someone can get experience of it, the better.
At the latest count, 140,000 16-17s alone were looking for that experience but failing to find it. The result is that unemployment in this group now stands at 30 per cent. And those young people are then far more likely to wind up as one of the one million NEETs: not in employment, education, or training as adults.
The left sees summer jobs (and employment generally) through the Marxist lens of oppression. They think that if someone is working, value must be being extracted from them, and so everyone should be protected from work, rather than encouraged into it. Labour are against out-sourcing unless it is contracting out their own thinking on employment to the trade unions. And the Lib Dems are simply the party of graduates, mostly working in the public sector.
So, we get back to the broken deal young people today are getting. They can’t get a summer job, then they don’t have the experience on their CV to get a graduate job. If they do, they find that the premium those jobs used to pay has been all but eroded, and they’re expected to make enormous payments on student loans that don’t feel worth it.
My summer job led to a career in business, followed by a change to enter politics in 2019 because I recognised that both the Conservative party and the country were veering badly off course.
Saving the summer job represents only one set of the pro-growth policies we are working on to do that. We will cut taxes for people and businesses, scrapping stamp duty on homes and business rates for businesses. We will bring down energy costs with our cheap energy plan, and we will continue to wield the chainsaw against the thicket of red tape.
Together with backing business, wealth creators, and risk takers, these policies will let business create growth and jobs. We have a responsibility to hand the next generation a better and more prosperous country than the one we lived in, failing to act would be nothing short of betrayal.
Andrew Griffith is the Shadow Secretary of State for Business and Trade, MP for Arundel and South Downs and a former FTSE100 Finance Director and COO.
You cannot blame young people today for feeling a sense of intergeneration injustice, the consequences of which make them far less likely to be conservatives.
Where to start?
A chronic lack of private housing supply, high marginal tax rates to repay student loans, or inheriting a pro-rata £44,000 share of a national debt to pay for a state largesse you had no choice about. It’s not the first time a generation has felt hard done by, but this time does feel unusually bad.
Now, the frontier has moved to jobs. Specifically, whether the ladder of opportunity and dignity that is real employment in a real job can deliver for current generations.
The challenge for Conservatives amongst younger voters is well known, but sooner or later the party which stands up for the ambitious young against an employment market which is badly failing so many will reap electoral dividends. Even for those more senior in life, worklessness among their younger relatives is a much more tangible indicator of a failing economy than banging on about abstractions like inflation or the gilt yield (important though those are).
The difficulties of securing a good, well-paid job is a crisis in plain sight. Few in Westminster other than Kemi Badenoch, Shadow Welfare Secretary Helen Whately, and I have been talking about it. Perhaps it’s the staggering lack of private sector experience from which Parliament suffers?
Every journey begins with a single step and for many that is – or was – gaining early experience of work with a summer job or weekend shift. Twenty years ago, roughly half of 16–17-year-olds had some kind of job. Today, it’s down to around 1 in 5 and falling fast.
For me, it was making jam donuts and hot cross buns in a Tesco instore bakery, cleaning tennis courts, and later driving a van. Kemi’s fast-food prowess is now well known. Few would imagine these jobs to be the pinnacle of ambition, but they provided a sense of how to go about the workplace, a first taste of independent spending money, and some experience to put down on a CV.
But perhaps most importantly, those summer jobs were something of a right – and a rite of passage – for young people. Something your older brother had, you had, and then your younger sister had, too. Their disappearance, presided over by a generation that itself benefited from climbing the ladder of which these were the first rung, is so very symptomatic of the broken intergenerational compact we now see across Britain.
All parties bear some responsibility for this. Too often politicians with precious little experience outside Westminster preferred to go along with growing the thicket of red tape rather than cutting it. Under Kemi Badenoch’s leadership, the changed Conservative party will not make that mistake.
Last week we unveiled our proposals to ‘Save the Summer Job’. Removing outdated and complex red tape, supporting sectors such as hospitality, retail, and tourism which provide summer and part-time opportunities – and a commitment to lower taxes.
It builds on our previous commitment to repeal all the job destroying measures in Labour’s ‘back to the 1970’s’ Employment Rights Act and our plans to support Britain’s High Streets.
The red tape we propose to scrap is measured and builds on detailed, line-by-line scrutiny. Many of the worst rules date to the EU’s rigid Working Time Directive. Flexibility for 16-17s to take their break when it suits them, rather than being mandated to take it after exactly 4.5 hours is one. The choice to work an extra hour, to midnight, on Fridays and Saturdays or outside of term time is another. We also want to scrap the rules that require them to take two consecutive days off in one go every week – meaning for example that they can’t work alternate days across the Summer.
For under 16s, we want to enable weekend jobs by scrapping the almost Victorian two-hour limit on Sunday work. It dates from a time when Sunday trading hours were much stricter, and it limits what is prime time for many in that age group. None of these are health and safety rules, none would be out of place in competitor countries, and none of them would clash with education or training. Instead, this is common sense Conservatism informed by businesses who tell us they want to give young people the same start which they had in life but cannot make it through the minefield of employment red tape to do so.
Only Conservatives understand that work is a good thing, and that the earlier someone can get experience of it, the better.
At the latest count, 140,000 16-17s alone were looking for that experience but failing to find it. The result is that unemployment in this group now stands at 30 per cent. And those young people are then far more likely to wind up as one of the one million NEETs: not in employment, education, or training as adults.
The left sees summer jobs (and employment generally) through the Marxist lens of oppression. They think that if someone is working, value must be being extracted from them, and so everyone should be protected from work, rather than encouraged into it. Labour are against out-sourcing unless it is contracting out their own thinking on employment to the trade unions. And the Lib Dems are simply the party of graduates, mostly working in the public sector.
So, we get back to the broken deal young people today are getting. They can’t get a summer job, then they don’t have the experience on their CV to get a graduate job. If they do, they find that the premium those jobs used to pay has been all but eroded, and they’re expected to make enormous payments on student loans that don’t feel worth it.
My summer job led to a career in business, followed by a change to enter politics in 2019 because I recognised that both the Conservative party and the country were veering badly off course.
Saving the summer job represents only one set of the pro-growth policies we are working on to do that. We will cut taxes for people and businesses, scrapping stamp duty on homes and business rates for businesses. We will bring down energy costs with our cheap energy plan, and we will continue to wield the chainsaw against the thicket of red tape.
Together with backing business, wealth creators, and risk takers, these policies will let business create growth and jobs. We have a responsibility to hand the next generation a better and more prosperous country than the one we lived in, failing to act would be nothing short of betrayal.