THE HEALTH FOUNDATION – WRITTEN EVIDENCE (YUN0045)
Youth Unemployment Committee inquiry
The Health Foundation is an independent charity committed to bringing about better health and health care for people in the UK. Our aim is a healthier population, supported by high quality health care that can be equitably accessed. We learn what works to make people’s lives healthier and improve the health care system. From giving grants to those working at the front line to carrying out research and policy analysis, we shine a light on how to make successful change happen.
We make links between the knowledge we gain from working with those delivering health and health care and our research and analysis. Our aspiration is to create a virtuous circle, using what we know works on the ground to inform effective policymaking and vice versa. We believe good health and health care are key to a flourishing society. Through sharing what we learn, collaborating with others and building people’s skills and knowledge, we aim to make a difference and contribute to a healthier population.
The Health Foundation launched the Young people’s future health inquiry in 2017 to explore young people’s ability to access the core building blocks of health: a place to call home, secure and rewarding work, and supportive relationships with their friends, family and community. These building blocks help young people to build the foundation for a healthy life. Young people need the opportunities which help them build these foundations and the systems around them need to create these opportunities.
Current challenges to securing employment
The Young people’s future health inquiry considered that secure and rewarding work is one of the key building blocks for a healthy future. Youth unemployment can have serious long- term effects on future employability and wages, and therefore on long-term living standards and health. Research shows that periods out of work can have a ‘scarring’ effect, for young men especially, whereby their earnings and employment chances are still affected years later. Young people’s current and future earnings have significant implications for their health, as previous Health Foundation analysis has shown. People in the bottom 40% of the income distribution are almost twice as likely to report poor health than those in the top 20%.
Prior to COVID-19, the Health Foundation found that young people already faced significant barriers to accessing the job market. This included a lack of personal connections needed to get on their chosen career track, insufficient work opportunities in their local area, or not having a financial safety net whilst trying to secure work.
‘I’m currently temping doing admin at a local authority in the social care team. It’s only a six-month contract covering someone on maternity leave. I’m pretty frustrated as this is not what I want to be doing. I worked hard at school, and have a teaching qualification from Belfast. I had thought teaching would be a safe bet leading to a good, stable job with a steady salary.” (Mary, 26, Newtonabbey)
COVID-19 has reinforced these barriers to employment, with young people facing some of the worst consequences of the economic downturn. Analysis by the Resolution Foundation shows that out of the older age groups, young people were more likely to be put on furlough, have their working hours reduced and experience lower pay.
Some groups of young people have faced even greater difficulty as a result of the pandemic. Health Foundation analysis shows that young people with the lowest household income were most likely to have lost employment or have had their hours cut, compared to those in the highest income group (at 8% and 6.2% respectively). Additionally, this analysis found that young people from a minority ethnic background were twice as likely to no longer be working or have had their hours cut at the start of the pandemic compared to their white peers (at 13.9% and 6.7% respectively).
The economic crisis has significant implications for young people’s immediate and long-term health. Analysis from The Prince’s Trust annual Youth Index found that young people who were not in education, employment or training during the pandemic were much more likely to experience suicidal thoughts than their peers, at 28% and 21% respectively.
In order to enable young people to access good-quality work, policymakers need to look beyond boosting the number of jobs available in the labour market, but also look to tackling the many barriers preventing young people from accessing these opportunities in the first instance. Moreover, many of these factors are interconnected and often reinforce each other, putting some groups of young people at extensive disadvantage within a complex system.
Housing is one of the most significant challenges. Many young people face an impossible choice: unaffordable housing and better work opportunities, or more affordable housing in areas with a weaker job market. Research by the Chartered Institute for Housing, commissioned by the Health Foundation, argues that young people engaged in precarious forms of work will affect their ability to meet housing costs and lead to housing instability. In the current context this is concerning as analysis shows since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, private renters are now more than twice as likely than mortgagors to have lost their job (8% compared to 3%).
‘I barely have enough money to pay my rent. It’s like a panic – and I’ve got all this time to sit and think about it.’ (Unnamed young person, in Generation COVID-19)
Improving housing security for young people in requires concerted, long-term action to increase the amount of social housing available. Learning from the eviction ban enacted during the COVID-19 pandemic, there is immediate action the government can take to give young people greater housing security. The government should now bring forward the long overdue Renters Reform Bill, which will improve young people’s experiences of the private rental sector by ending ‘no-fault’ (Section 21) evictions.
Health Foundation research found that young people without a strong safety-net, whether that is practical or financial support from their parents, experienced particularly stressful housing experiences. For example, many young people who did not have support for housing costs relied on benefits and low-cost housing would end up living in inadequate housing. This has been exacerbated by COVID-19: recent analysis by YouGov found that 21% of young renters have reported that the pandemic has directly or indirectly forced them to move, which is linked to their increased likelihood of losing work and therefore defaulting on rent payments.
Having a safety-net matters for employment prospects, as it allows young people to take positive risks such as changing their career paths, or weathering periods of unemployment. Whilst statutory benefits help to provide a safety-net to disadvantaged young people, they still lose out in schemes such as Universal Credit. Research by the Resolution Foundation found that 67% of single parent 16-24-year olds face income reductions as a result of the switch to Universal Credit from the legacy system. This follows a long-term trend of successive governments deprioritising welfare support for young people, relative to older working-age adults and pensioners.
The Young people's future health inquiry found that having the right personal connections was one of the most important factors determining young people’s future job opportunities. Relationships and social capital were not just about knowing people who can help you find a job, but also providing the ‘know-how’ to thrive in the working world. Research from the Prince’s Trust found that young people from more affluent families were more likely to have help writing a CV, filling out an application, preparing for an interview or finding work experience. For highly competitive industries, such as law, having the right personal connections can help young people make the first step onto the career ladder, but informal advice and guidance is also invaluable for all trades, whether that be through knowledge of the routes into an industry or informal discussions about the realities of the work.
Not all young people have the right personal connections or access to family members with careers experience. In a Health Foundation commissioned survey of young people aged 22- 26, 89% of respondents said that having the right relationships and networking opportunities to help them enter and progress through the working environment is important, but only 31% felt they fully had these growing up. As a result, it is even more important that all young people have access to good-quality careers support.
However, the existing careers education system is not providing young people with the best possible support. Whilst all young people across all four devolved nations are guaranteed careers advice and support before they leave education, there are concerns about the quality of this advice. Research by the Institute for Employment Studies, commissioned by the Health Foundation, identified a complex and confusing system, with issues around support being too light touch, gaps in provision, issues around quality and effectiveness, and concerns that support is not tailored to individuals’ needs. Additionally, they found that there wasn’t enough support for those with less social capital to compete on the same terms as those with greater access to opportunities and networks.
Work experience is a vital way for young people to learn and develop employability skills that they may not be able to develop through formal learning. Research indicates that work experience is particularly important for young people, as it can address employers’ concerns about work skills and provide more support to young people needing more help to adjust to work habits and behaviours. The Education Policy Institute found that a young person who has four or more encounters with an employer whilst in education is 86% less likely not to be in education, employment or training and can earn up to 22% more during their career, compared to those who did not have such encounters.
Having clear pathways between education and the labour market is critical for young people’s success securing high quality work. Research by the Education Policy Institute, commissioned by the Health Foundation, highlights that career guidance focuses on the ‘academic track’, wherein young people will complete A-Levels before moving on to a bachelor's degree, but does not provide young people with enough advice on other pathways into work, such as vocational training.
Improving uptake of further education will require the government to provide greater funding towards this sector, which has seen disproportionate levels of funding cuts. The EPI found that there has been a significant fall in funding available for 16-19 education between 2013/14 to 2017/18, and by twice the size of cuts to school funding. Since 2012, further education students are now funded 8% below pupils in secondary schools. This is likely to have implications for the provision and quality of further education on offer.
The Chancellor’s recent announcement of additional funding for traineeships and ‘flexi-job’ apprenticeships in the Budget is a welcomed step towards improving parity between higher and further education pathways. As the EPI have previously called for, the government should now provide the further education sector with a more enduring financial settlement to sustain quality provision in the long term. Furthermore, this funding should account for the wider services provided by the sector, including extra-curricular activities and careers support.
Emerging evidence on the economic and social impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic shows that young people aged 12–24 years are one of the worst-affected groups, particularly in terms of the labour market and mental health outcomes.
Government employment programmes such as JETS and RESTART are new schemes to help reduce unemployment, focusing on short- and long-term unemployment respectively. These programmes focus on practical skills for getting jobs, with sessions on CV writing, interview technique and signposting job opportunities. Despite the greater likelihood of poor mental health among the groups targeted by these policies, there is no explicit focus or recognition of how they affect (and can help improve) mental health.
In forthcoming research, Dr Adam Coutts at the University of Cambridge, demonstrates that good quality active labour market policies (ALMPs) contain a number of crucial elements which provide social support, reduce loneliness and get someone back into a structured routine. Key to supporting mental health is a focus on self-efficacy, and the psychological resources to cope with the stresses of unemployment. As the evidence shows, it is possible through these programmes to protect people against the mental health challenges of unemployment as well as help them into work.
Research by the Institute for Employment Studies, commissioned by the Health Foundation as part of the Young people’s future health inquiry, focused on the Big Lottery Fund’s ‘Building Better Opportunities’ programme. This sought to summarise the practical implications of the range of process evaluation findings on active labour market programmes and suggested four key ingredients of successful interventions with disadvantaged groups:
inspirational, know their local patch and focus on outcomes (particularly on finding work)
review and the opportunity to chart their own course.
This also emphasised that for disadvantaged young people, “critical success factors include: having smaller scale programmes that feel less ‘institutional’ and are shorter in duration; focusing on work experience and the transition to work so as to address employers’ concerns about work skills; and having holistic support in recognition that young unemployed people may need more help in adjusting to work habits and behaviours.” It also highlighted the importance of any training programmes being well targeted, not excessively classroom based, and focused on building employability as well as job-specific skills – drawing on research for the UK government.
The Education Policy Institute highlights how pupils in Finland benefit from a consolidated and world-renowned career education system that spans all educational stages and is also available during a worker’s lifetime. In primary and secondary education, school career services provide students with 76 hours of counselling, both in one-to-one and group sessions, where they cover study skills, life at school, further education options and information around occupations. These activities can take place in the classroom or in employers’ facilities. Schools are required to have links with employers, as pupils between the age 13 – 16 are entitled to work experience. At the upper-secondary level, the focus is on further study and careers, but careers counsellors still have a duty to preserve and promote students’ wellbeing.
Health Foundation research found that the rise in unemployment is not distributed evenly across society. While the unemployment rate was estimated at 5.1% in January 2021, the highest rates were among young people aged 18–24 (14.0%), people with lower qualifications (7.8%) and people from minority ethnic groups (7.6%). The research also found in January 2021, 43% of unemployed people had poor mental health.
The research also found workers with existing mental health conditions are also more likely to work in sectors that have had to close due to COVID-19 restrictions, such as hospitality, making them vulnerable to job losses. The disproportionate impact of the pandemic on people working in these sectors is evidenced by the current challenges faced by the north- east England post-Covid. The UK’s Trades Union Congress warned in June that the Yorkshire and the Humber region are on the brink of a surge in youth unemployment, because a high proportion of young people in the area worked in sectors that have been affected by the pandemic, including hospitality, the arts and retail.
With this in mind, future youth market labour interventions must be targeted towards regions most affected by the pandemic, those from deprived backgrounds and young people suffering with poor mental health. As outlined in the previous question, it is also critical that interventions are targeted towards disadvantaged young people with the critical success factors in mind.
The government’s Kickstart Scheme has the potential to support young people disproportionately affected by the pandemic, as they were more likely to have experienced a sustained reduction in pay, been put on furlough or let go from their jobs all together. Despite this, the scheme to create 250,000 jobs for young people following the pandemic has led to fewer than 500 actually starting posts in one of the region’s most vulnerable to the crisis. The scheme presents a real opportunity to encourage employers to hire young people, but it is critical that the government scales up the Kickstart programme and continues to place young people at the heart of their COVID-19 economic recovery plans. The Learning Institute calls for widening the eligibility for Kickstart to young people not on benefits and better join it up with apprenticeships and skills support and the introduction of a Job Guarantee to create a further six month paid job for those out of work the longest.
10th May 2021