Labour leader Ed Miliband has promised to cut Job Seekers’ Allowance (JSA) for around 100,000 18-to-21-year-olds and replace it with a lower means-tested benefit depending on claimants’ qualifications and skill levels.
This will affect those young people under 21 who have do not have A-levels — around seven out of ten 18-to-21-year-olds currently claiming JSA.
Miliband told the press that “Britain’s young people who do not have the skills they need for work should be in training, not on benefits.”
What Labour have not explained is why young people can’t receive training and enough to live on at the same time.
This policy will kick young people already reeling from tuition fees, the abolition of Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) and record levels of youth unemployment.
JSA is already too low — £57.35 a week (£8.19 a day) for under-25s. The new rate could be even lower, as it is means-tested on the basis of parental income.
The Labour policy follows the same reactionary course as the Tories’ plans to remove housing benefit from under-25s and increasing young peoples’ reliance on their parents.
There are innumerable and obvious reasons why young people cannot, or do not want to, live with family members — parents or guardians may be abusive or homophobic, or young people and family members may simply not get on.
Recent Trade Union Congress (TUC) research shows that prospects for young people not in full-time work or education have deteriorated sharply in the last decade and a half.
This does point to increased barriers for young people getting into work, including lack of skills. But any policy which does not take into account an unemployment rate of nearly 7% is really about demonising those individuals who are out of work.
Labour needs a programme for decent, unionised, and socially useful jobs, expanded, well-funded training, and living benefits.
This new policy smacks of political posturing and Labour’s tendency to bend towards rather than shape public opinion.
At a time when the welfare state has been chipped away by decades of means-testing, Labour needs to break with austerity and stand up for universal benefits for those in need.
