Special report: a generation of young Londoners with no job,
no prospects and no hope.
The capital is in the grip of a youth unemployment crisis
with one in four out of work. In a three-day investigation starting today, the
Standard reveals the scale of young joblessness and its cost to individuals and
society. Here we focus on three people who are desperate for work.
Sana Babar's break seemed to come quickly. A couple of
months after leaving sixth form, she applied for a sales assistant job at
Harrods — they screened her over the phone, liked what they heard and called
her in for a group interview.
“I was really excited,” recalled Sana. “There were 20 of us
and we had to introduce ourselves, say what skills we brought to the job and
what we’d do if Harrods gave us a £1,000 voucher. I was the youngest — the
others were in their twenties and thirties — and the second last to speak.
“When my turn came, I stood up and said: ‘My name is Sana,
I’m confident, I’m motivated.’ Then I paused and got stuck for about four or
five seconds. Everybody was staring at me and I suddenly felt overwhelmed and
started to panic. The woman from Harrods was at the front manically writing
down what people said and she sat, pen poised, not looking up, and I thought,
oh my God, I better talk some more.
”I said, ‘Um, I’m bubbly, approachable, good at talking to
people at all levels, good at talking to customers’. Again, I froze. I looked
out at the blank faces — they had all been so confident in their delivery with
real experience to draw on, but this was my first interview and all I had was
five days’ work experience at Clarks Shoes.
“I tried to hold my hands by my side, not to fidget to show
I wasn’t nervous, but it was obvious I was bombing. Then I said that with the
gift voucher, I would buy my mum a Louis Vuitton bag and one woman piped up
that she preferred the Gucci, and a few people laughed, and it put me at my
ease.”
But Sana never got through to the final round of interviews.
In the 15 months since, the 19-year-old from Tower Hamlets has diligently applied
for a staggering 3,000 jobs, an average of 10 a day, and in that time has
secured just four interviews and no employment. Not one of these firms has ever
taken the time to give her any feedback as to why her application failed. “It
is a process,” she said, “that is utterly soul destroying.”
Her plight, an Evening Standard investigation reveals, is
all too common. Youth unemployment in our capital city has soared to crisis
proportions not seen for a generation. One in four young people aged 16 to 24
is unemployed rising to 27 per cent among young men — a total of 120,000 in all
— and nearly triple the average London unemployment rate of 8.9 per cent.
Together with Yorkshire, London suffers, at 25 per cent, the
worst youth unemployment rate in the UK, according to figures released by the
Office for National Statistics. There is
no doubt that our young people have borne the brunt of the economic crisis.
Among London’s black and Asian youth, the problem is far worse. Nowhere is the
issue more acute than in the Olympic boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Newham,
which have among the highest number of young people claiming Jobseeker’s
Allowance in the capital.
As the euphoria of the Olympics and Paralympics fades, the
promises made to win these Games on behalf of London’s youth needs to be
examined afresh. It was 30 school children from east London who accompanied
Lord Coe to Singapore in 2005, so that
he could ask for the Games “on behalf of the youth of today, the athletes of
tomorrow and the Olympians of the future”.
But those school children of 2005 —now young adults — have
every right to feel betrayed. The hype that the Games would “inspire a
generation” and transform lives is at odds with the devastating impact that
long-term joblessness brings including depression, social exclusion, and
crushed self-esteem, especially to young people who have no previous track
record of success to fall back on.
The Standard has spoken to dozens of unemployed young
people, as well as experts and politicians, to reveal what it is really like to
be young, unemployed and in limbo. In an exposé of the crisis starting today,
we tell the shocking stories of life at the coal-face, and we address a key
question: Why is the unemployment rate of young people (16 to 24) more than three
times that of older people (25 to 49)?
The latest research from The Work Foundation, an independent
think tank, indicates it is not age, per se, that is the problem — young people
tend to be better at IT and at picking up foreign languages.
Rather it comes down to one critical factor — lack of
experience. “Young people,” they report, “find themselves caught in a classic
Catch 22 situation: they cannot get a job without work experience, and they
cannot get work experience without a job.” Measures that help young people
bridge the experience gap, such as apprenticeship schemes, could be a key part
of the solution.
Country-wide, just over one million young people remain
jobless. The Government’s £1 billion Youth Contract to address “the missing million”
was introduced this year to offer employers small cash incentives to get young
people into work.
A report released today by the Work and Pensions committee
concludes that while it is a step in the right direction, it is “insufficient
on its own, given the scale of the problem”. What is clear is that we need some
can-do urgency from the Government and the private sector if we are to avert
economic and social catastrophe.
The projected cost to our economy of youth unemployment over
the next decade is estimated at £28 billion. Meanwhile, the personal “scarring
effect” to each youth who remains jobless ratchets up.
According to the Audit Commission, unemployed young adults
are three times more likely to suffer depression than youngsters with jobs.
Sana is a case in point. “I hear about people my age with
similar GCSE qualifications — I got four Cs — getting jobs as supervisors and I
think, what’s wrong with me? Is it my CV? The way I dress? The way I talk? I
start to doubt myself and get stressed and depressed.”
Recently Sana hit a bad patch. She stopped going out with
her friends and wanted to take anti-depressants, but her mother got her through
it.
“Dad hasn’t been around for 10 years and I have watched my
mother dig deep. She used to work in a Hackney factory making ballet shoes, and
now she works as a night-duty security guard to support me and my two sisters.
Mum is my inspiration.
“If she can do it, I can too. I tell that to myself every
single day, just to keep going.”
Source: London Evening Standard, David Cohen, 19th September
2012
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/work/special-report-a-generation-of-young-londoners-with-no-job-no-prospects-and-no-hope-8156404.html
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