As Andy Burnham begins his term as Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade, he takes charge of a country where young adults – even those who have “done well” in the eyes of their parents and grandparents – face increasingly bleak futures.
They can’t afford to move out of their parents’ homes. They head to the local Job Centre to be told there are no suitable jobs for them. As they get older, they question whether they can afford to have children or not.
Our new PM has been clear that their future is a top priority for him. In his first speech as Prime Minister, Burnham said: “We will help more young people into work by changing the education system and giving them more support [and] more mental health support.”
Previously, he described how voters’ complaints on the doorstep in Makerfield about the £12,570 threshold for the personal tax allowance are “lodged in his mind”. It has been frozen in cash terms since 2021. Much like the Rachel Reeves’s decision to freeze tax and student loan repayment thresholds last year, this acts as a drag on people’s pay rises, generating money for the Treasury at the expense of workers. Last year, at Reform’s conference in Birmingham, every single young Reform member I interviewed told me that the party’s promise to raise the personal tax threshold was the key reason they decided to join Nigel Farage’s party.
