The PM praises unpaid placements from a supermarket that has cut 3,000 jobs
Daily Telegraph 28/08/26
A million young people in this country have no job, nor are they undergoing any training or education to help secure one.
This fact has become so well-worn of late you may as well put it on the side of a bus, yet successive governments have proved capable only of worsening the issue – and the latest seems intent on rubbing salt in the wound.
In a remarkably tone-deaf bit of comms, our new prime minister Andy Burnham has demanded we praise a Potemkin employer in a depressing portent of how this Government will meet its goals.
Just a year after it culled 3,000 jobs – a move it quietly blamed on the rise in employer National Insurance contributions – Sainsbury’s has announced 10,000 unpaid work experience placements, and Burnham has praised this as an example to follow.
The move comes shortly after the Prime Minister asked employers simply to fix youth unemployment, and now we’re being asked to applaud those who have answered the call in the cheapest way possible.
The Neets crisis, an acronym representing those not in employment, education or training, has long been bubbling under the surface but was firmly thrust into the spotlight by the Milburn Review, which warned of a “lost generation”.
Not only does this issue deeply affect the lives of those million young people, but it’s costing the nation a fortune – £125bn per year, according to the report, more than double the defence budget.
Graduates face the worst jobs market on record, while the unemployment rate for those aged 16 to 24 is almost three times higher than the national average.
Burnham said it was great to see Sainsbury’s “stepping up”, while Labour MP Tony Vaughan cloyingly described it as “incredible news”, complete with exclamation mark.
I’m not a man of particularly advanced years, but even I find myself wistfully remembering a time when a job such as stacking shelves at Sainsbury’s was supposed to be a rite of passage fairly compensated for with a wage packet.
The Saturday job teaches valuable skills, such as learning to interact with people of different ages and backgrounds from your own, taking responsibility in life, and, vitally, learning to suck it up and get on with something you don’t want to do.
In return, you are afforded your first taste of independence, both in your treatment as an individual not defined by your family, and a small amount of cash that is yours to do with as you please.
As a man who’s worked in a fair sum of good and not good jobs since the age of 12 (don’t tell the council), I can certainly attest to their character-building nature. But I can tell you without a doubt I’d have passed them all up if the only recompense was “experience”.
What’s most galling is not just that the leader of the Labour Party is proud of securing unpaid work for thousands of young people, but that he knows how to resolve this crisis, yet won’t.
Sainsbury’s isn’t the only business to cull jobs in the wake of former chancellor Rachel Reeves’s fiddling with employer National Insurance. At her maiden Budget, Reeves not only increased the rate from 13.8pc to 15pc, but almost halved the salary threshold from £9,100 to £5,000.
Restaurateur Tom Kerridge is just one of many voices in the hospitality industry admitting that rising costs had forced them to abandon young workers in favour of full-timers, while the owner of luxury fashion brand David Nieper said they had reduced their intake of trainees from “at least a dozen” to “no more than a couple”.
Labour has also tied its own hands over the minimum wage, a salary level that clearly needs to be reduced but is politically unpalatable for any party.
In just three years the minimum wage for 18 to 20-year-olds has been increased by 45pc, yet policymakers continue to ask why young people aren’t being hired.
I know I didn’t love working for pennies on the pound of my older colleagues, but it’s better than nothing.
The Government has been told time and again the solution to the problem. Even a former Office for Budget Responsibility official came out and said the youth unemployment crisis was “self-inflicted”.
Yet Burnham refuses to lower employer National Insurance, refuses to lower the minimum wage and instead thinks asking businesses nicely might fix the issue.
Worst of all, it won’t be long until Burnham comes out and trumpets his Government’s success in reducing the number of Neets in this country – because unpaid placements count towards these figures.
Much like kicking patients off NHS waiting lists or telling people to build homes in their gardens, this is yet another exercise in modern Labour’s prowess at massaging figures to meet targets instead of resolving the issue – and I doubt the “lost generation” will forgive them.
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