Matthew Jeffery is an experienced global talent and recruitment leader, with more than 25 years advising boards and C-suite executives on workforce strategy, skills, and productivity.
Britain’s parents have no shortage of things to get angry about. Taxes. Crime. NHS waiting lists. Potholes. Petrol prices. Even the ending of The Traitors. Yet when it comes to something that should have us absolutely furious, the prospect of Britain squandering the talents of an entire generation and leaving our children with a worse standard of living than our own, where the hell is the outrage?
We’re standing by watching a car crash unfold before our eyes. Young people are leaving university with enormous debts, struggling to find decent jobs, priced out of home ownership and increasingly dependent on their parents to achieve the ordinary milestones of adult life. We grew up believing that if you worked hard, made something of yourself and played by the rules, you could expect a better life than your parents enjoyed. Each generation was supposed to do better than the last. Now we’re watching that promise unravel.
We can mobilise an entire neighbourhood to oppose a housing development. We spent years arguing passionately about Brexit, falling out with friends and family over the country’s future. Yet when our own children cannot afford a home, or send off hundreds of job applications without getting a single opportunity, where is that same fighting spirit? We’re prepared to fight for the country we want to live in but what have we done to fight for the country we’re leaving our children?
Instead, we’ve found a thoroughly British solution. We have privatised the consequences of national failure. The Bank of Mum and Dad provides the deposit, the spare bedroom absorbs the housing shortage and parental savings compensate for wages that no longer stretch far enough. What ought to be a national scandal has become a family expense. And why should politicians feel any urgency to fix a broken system when parents are quietly paying to keep it going?
And how did we prepare our children for the future we promised them? We pushed them through an education system obsessed with qualifications. GCSEs, A-levels, university, another certificate, another hoop to jump through. We told them a degree was their passport to success, then sent them into the world with debts approaching £50,000 and no guarantee of a job. Some ended up making coffees or stacking supermarket shelves, work they could have started three years earlier without the debt. There is no shame in those jobs. The shame belongs to the politicians, universities and parents who persuaded an entire generation that anything short of a degree was somehow second best.
What extraordinary snobbery we’ve created around apprenticeships. We still talk about them as though they’re for young people who aren’t academic enough for university. What utter nonsense. Apprenticeships can lead to brilliant careers in engineering and skilled trades but also audit, accountancy, technology and consulting. The Big Four accounting firms offer routes into professional careers that previous generations assumed required a degree. A teenager can earn a salary, gain professional qualifications and start building a career while their friends accumulate university debt. By the time those friends graduate, the apprentice could already have several years of experience, perhaps a promotion or two and money in the bank. Yet how many parents would still rather boast that their child had gone to university?
And after all those years of education, what do the qualifications actually tell an employer? When grade inflation sees top grades become commonplace, how do you distinguish genuine ability from somebody who’s simply brilliant at passing exams? Businesses don’t trust the education system so they respond by creating their own obstacle courses. Psychometric tests, aptitude assessments, recorded video interviews, assessment centres. When employers feel compelled to create their own examinations, what does that say about the value of the qualifications we’ve spent years awarding?
And what the hell are our schools preparing children for anyway? Artificial intelligence is transforming entire professions, yet we’re still educating children as though remembering the right answer matters more than knowing what to do with it. Machines can retrieve information in seconds. What they cannot replace so easily is the human judgement to question it, challenge it and turn it into something valuable. Where is the urgency about teaching creativity, communication, initiative and independent thought? Where are the practical skills that will help young people navigate a working world changing faster than our politicians seem capable of understanding?
Meanwhile, teachers are left battling disruption, projecting their left wing agendas, absenteeism and bureaucracy when they should be inspiring the next generation. We have politicians endlessly lecturing businesses about the future of work while presiding over an education system still preparing children for the past.
We’ve even managed to make getting a first taste of work unnecessarily complicated. Saturday jobs, summer work, work experience in local businesses. Remember when these were ordinary parts of growing up? Young people learned to turn up on time, deal with customers, take responsibility and discover that nobody owes them a living.
Today, permits, restrictions, paperwork and employers’ concerns about liability can discourage businesses from offering those opportunities. Of course children need protecting but have we lost all sense of proportion? We demand experience, confidence and a work ethic from young people while making it harder for them to acquire any of them. We’ve made it harder to get a first job, then treat young people as failures for never having had one.
What happens to a country when an entire generation becomes too financially insecure to take risks? Who starts a business when next month’s rent is already a struggle? Who gambles on a new idea when failure means moving back into their childhood bedroom? Talented people abandon opportunities and potential entrepreneurs choose security over ambition. Then politicians wonder why Britain suffers from sluggish growth and miserable productivity. We’ve made independence increasingly unaffordable while lecturing young people about enterprise and personal responsibility. Capitalism depends on people willing to take risks, build businesses and create wealth. But you cannot expect a generation to gamble on its future when it can barely afford to live in the present.
After twenty-five years in recruitment, I’ve watched successive governments make grand speeches about opportunity while making it increasingly expensive for businesses to deliver. Employers don’t recruit out of charity. An experienced employee can contribute immediately, while a young person needs training, supervision and investment. Yet governments keep increasing the cost of giving them that chance, then wonder why young people cannot get a foot through the door.
Employer National Insurance, rising minimum wages and mounting employment regulation have increased the cost of taking on inexperienced workers. Labour raised employer National Insurance and this week’s Budget announced another minimum wage increase, taking the rate for workers aged 21 and over to £13.21 an hour from April 2027. I want young people to earn decent wages. Of course I do. But they cannot earn a wage from a job that doesn’t exist. Ministers congratulate themselves on putting more money into workers’ pockets while employers quietly reconsider whether they can afford another recruit.
What good is a higher minimum wage to the young applicant who never gets an interview because the business cannot justify creating the position? You cannot legislate somebody into employment by making their job more expensive to create.
Employers themselves are telling us what is happening. The CBI’s latest survey found that just 15 per cent of businesses were confident about hiring, down from 24 per cent last year. More damning still, 44 per cent said rising recruitment and onboarding costs were pushing them towards experienced candidates, while 53 per cent said wider cost pressures meant they were offering fewer apprenticeships than they wanted to. Think about the absurdity. Politicians demand that businesses train the next generation, employers explain that rising costs are restricting their ability to do so and Westminster responds with another review. We don’t have a shortage of speeches about opportunity. We have a shortage of policies that make providing it worthwhile.
The consequences are costing Britain a fortune. Alan Milburn’s government-commissioned review estimates that almost a million young people outside education, employment or training are costing Britain £125 billion a year in lost economic potential and wider consequences. Yet in 2024–25, the Department for Work and Pensions spent approximately £25 on benefits for young people for every £1 spent on employment support. Of course some need financial support but surely our ambition should be to help as many as possible become independent. Instead, we’re spending vastly more managing economic inactivity than helping young people escape it. If somebody deliberately set out to squander the potential of the next generation, what exactly would they do differently?
We talk about youth unemployment as though it were simply another economic statistic. It isn’t. Imagine doing everything you were told was right. Working hard at school, getting your qualifications and finally securing that first job. Then discovering that, despite doing everything asked of you, independence remains stubbornly out of reach. And for those who cannot even secure that first opportunity, every passing month means lost experience, confidence and opportunity. Politicians can recover from disastrous Budgets. They cannot give a young person their twenties back.
So what would actually change things? To her credit, Kemi has proposed halving employer National Insurance for workers aged 21 to 24. Good. But I’d go further. Scrap employer National Insurance altogether for the first two years of a genuinely new job filled by someone under 25. Give smaller businesses tax relief for training first-time employees and redirect apprenticeship funding towards young people entering work rather than established professionals collecting another qualification. Put safeguards in place to prevent employers replacing existing workers simply to claim the relief. Why should we tax businesses for giving young people their first opportunity, then spend billions supporting those who never get one? The best youth employment policy isn’t another government scheme. It’s making Britain the easiest place in Europe to give a young person their first job.
But government isn’t the only culprit. What about our love affair with hybrid working? For somebody with twenty years of experience, working from home can be wonderful. But what about the 21-year-old sitting alone in a bedroom with a laptop, trying to understand how the working world operates? So much of professional life is learned by watching experienced colleagues, overhearing conversations, asking questions and making mistakes. You cannot replicate all of that through scheduled Teams calls, particularly when the people you need to learn from are working somewhere else. I’m not demanding everybody return to the office five days a week but surely we owe young people more than a laptop and a login. We’ve spent years debating where experienced people would prefer to work, while barely asking where inexperienced people learn best.
And just as we’re making it harder for young people to learn from experienced colleagues, artificial intelligence threatens to eliminate the very jobs through which previous generations learned their trade. Junior roles in law, accountancy, administration and research are increasingly vulnerable to automation. I welcome technological progress but if AI takes over the work through which young professionals gain experience, how will they ever develop? Employers cannot automate the bottom rung of the career ladder and expect experienced professionals to magically appear at the top. We’re making young people more expensive to hire while allowing technology to eliminate the jobs that once gave them a start. If nobody gets the chance to be junior, where do tomorrow’s seniors come from?
We have gone from championing a property-owning democracy to presiding over a property-inheriting democracy. And Conservatives should be ashamed. We preach hard work and aspiration while defending a system in which wealthy parents increasingly matter more than personal endeavour. I call it the Preservation State, a country organised around protecting existing wealth rather than creating opportunities to acquire it. Planning restrictions protect homeowners, regulation favours established businesses and politicians defend the advantages of existing voters. We spent fourteen years in government talking about opportunity while allowing the routes to achieving it to narrow. This didn’t happen on somebody else’s watch. We helped create it.
Nowhere is that failure more obvious than housing. Young people cannot afford to leave home, employers struggle to recruit because workers cannot afford to live near the jobs and the difference between buying a property and remaining a renter increasingly comes down to whether Mum and Dad can provide the deposit. Meanwhile, homeowners celebrate another £50,000 added to their property values as though Britain has somehow become richer. We’ve confused rising house prices with rising prosperity. For our children, every increase in the value of our homes can mean another step away from owning one themselves. What sort of property-owning democracy celebrates making property increasingly unaffordable?
And what happened to the family being the bedrock of Conservatism? We never stop talking about its importance, yet we’ve helped create a country where young couples postpone having children because they cannot afford a home or the financial security to raise a family. How can we claim to be the party of the family when starting one increasingly depends on the wealth of your parents? We’ve spent years defending the institution of the family while presiding over an economy in which forming one is becoming a luxury.
And then Conservatives wonder why young people won’t vote for us. Ipsos polling published in May found Conservative support among 18-to-34-year-olds at just 6 per cent, against 34 per cent for the Greens. More recent polling averages suggest some recovery but the Conservatives are still struggling to win over younger voters. The party of enterprise, aspiration and ownership cannot persuade the generation desperate for all three. Why should they trust us? You cannot spend your political life defending people who already own everything and expect those who own nothing to thank you for it.
Where is the fury inside our own party? I want Laura Trott, our Shadow Education Secretary, incandescent about what is happening to Britain’s children. I want her taking on universities selling expensive degrees with poor employment prospects, schools failing to prepare pupils for working life and politicians who have made independence unaffordable. Championing apprentices, overlooked teenagers and graduates who cannot get a foot through the door. If Conservatives aren’t prepared to fight for the next generation’s opportunities, what exactly are we conserving?
And where the hell are the Young Conservatives? They should be giving the party leadership sleepless nights, not politely applauding from the conference hall. Sometimes I wonder whether too many are more interested in securing a parliamentary selection than fighting for their own generation’s future. There’s nothing wrong with ambition but if becoming an MP matters more than the struggles of your contemporaries, perhaps you’ve misunderstood what politics is supposed to achieve. The Young Conservatives should be the most impatient, rebellious voices in the party. Instead, where is the rebellion? This is their fight. Their future.
Margaret Thatcher understood that capitalism had to create new owners, not simply protect existing ones. Right to Buy and wider share ownership gave ordinary working people the opportunity to acquire homes, capital and a stake in Britain’s prosperity. Her ambition was to spread ownership, not preserve the advantages of those who already had it. The greatest threat to capitalism is not socialism. It is a capitalism that ceases to produce capitalists.
Kemi Badenoch has an enormous opportunity to prove that Conservatism still understands this. Stop treating younger voters as a lost cause and give them a reason to believe again. They want jobs, homes, businesses and the freedom to stand on their own two feet. These aren’t socialist ambitions. They’re Conservative ones. Perhaps the road back to Downing Street begins with helping young people acquire something worth conserving.
Look across the Channel. French students have never been shy about making their anger heard. When they believe their futures are being sacrificed, they’re prepared to take to the streets and demand answers. We might question their methods but at least they’re prepared to challenge those in power. In France, they protest. In Britain, we remortgage to provide the deposit. What does it say about us that we’re more prepared to finance our children’s disadvantages than fight to remove them?
And politicians have worked us out. Homeowners vote, complain and organise. Young renters have far less political influence. So politicians protect house prices, appease existing homeowners and calculate that the next generation can wait. Why wouldn’t they? We’ve made protecting yesterday’s prosperity electorally rewarding and creating tomorrow’s prosperity politically optional. When did we last punish a politician at the ballot box for failing our children?
Our parents wanted us to have more than they did. They worked, saved and sacrificed because they believed their children should enjoy opportunities they never had. We were supposed to pass that promise on, not enjoy the rewards ourselves and pull up the ladder behind us. One day our children may ask why we stood by while their prospects diminished. What will we tell them? That we helped with the deposit? That we meant well? That protecting what we had mattered more than giving them the chance to build something of their own? A nation that cannot offer its children the opportunity to build prosperity of their own is not preserving prosperity. It is consuming it.