My career in the newspaper industry started at an early age. I was 11 years old when I had a paper round, getting up at dawn to deliver that day’s news and views to the good people of our north Manchester neighbourhood. I don’t know whether this prepared me for a lifetime in journalism, but it certainly helped me understand what work felt like.
These days, because of the decline in newspaper sales and obvious safety concerns, this particular line of employment for young people has sadly withered. Instead, today’s entrepreneurially-minded youngsters don’t have to leave home: they just flip open their laptops and sell those once-cutting edge trainers on Depop. Or find a gaming side hustle. Or become kidfluencers.
Others, however, may choose to spend all their time on social media. Either way, they represent what Alan Milburn, a former health secretary and a radical thinker of the Blairite school, this week called “The Bedroom Generation”, young people, atomised and insulated, who are neither prepared for, and some not particularly interested in, the more collaborative and structured endeavour that we may call the world of work.
There is very little criticism, direct or implied, of today’s cohort of teenagers in Milburn’s report, commissioned by this Government, into why almost one million of the UK’s 16 to 24-year-olds – about one in eight, and almost three times the general unemployment rate – were not in education, employment or training (the neat acronym is, in fact, “Neets”). Instead, Milburn blames the system, which, he says, “is trapping people in worklessness rather than enabling them into work”. Businesses must adapt to the new realities of the job market by offering greater flexibility and mental health support for young people, the report concludes. “We are at risk of a lost generation,” Milburn said.
