It's obvious why there's a YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT CRISIS! | Mark Littlewood explains on GB News

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]Joining us now is the director of PopCon, Popular Conservatism, Mark Littlewood. Mark, good morning. Thank you so much for joining us. Um, clearly these are worrying figures. The headline rate of unemployment is still relatively low from a historic perspective, and yet there's this concerning trend amongst young people. What do you think is leading to that rise?

[00:00:20]Yeah, Miriam, you're right. I mean, Andrew's just called it grim, I think at the top of the hour you called it concerning, you've just called it worrying, but none of it should be surprising. There's a pretty simple rule in economics. If you put the price of something up, people will consume less of it. If you put the price of tomatoes up, people will buy fewer tomatoes. If you put ice cream up, they'll eat less ice cream. And if you put the cost of labor up, people will employ fewer people. They'll consume less labor. And that's exactly what this ironically named labor government has done. So, put yourself in the shoes of, I don't know, a small business owner who's thinking, "Shall I take on a young person, 18, 19, 20-year-old? I think I might get about eight or nine pounds an hour of productivity or out of them, maybe a tenner, but I'm going to have to pay them more than that given the minimum wage. I have to pay national insurance on top. I'm not at all confident that my tax rates will come down anytime soon.

[00:01:20]So, that could be ratcheted up even further at the next budget. You know what? I'm not going to grow my company. I'm not going to take the risk. I'm not going to employ the person." So, we've got all the incentives in the wrong place, basically. And the young person themselves might be thinking, "Well, this isn't the most attractive job I could do. It's the bottom rung of the ladder. I'm feeling a bit depressed about life at the moment. I'm suffering from a little bit of anxiety. Maybe if I get signed off, I'll actually get about the same amount of money hitting my back pocket." So, at the young end of the labor market, that's what we're seeing, and it's hugely concerning. Because if you don't get work into your bloodstream as the basic norm of how you're going to live your life, we risk a wasted generation.

[00:02:06]And Mark, you'd have heard as much as often as I have various cabinet ministers saying we're going to massively increase the number of apprenticeships, apprenticeships which you would hope would go to people leaving school at 18. Do these apprenticeships ever materialize?

[00:02:19]Very rarely, Andrew. I share the the cynicism that I I inferred from your question there. Look, apprenticeships are a good thing, but you don't really want the government running them. You want companies running them. You want a plumbing company to say, "You know what?

[00:02:33]We want to take on 20 apprentices, and we want that to be cheap and easy to do." And you get into a mindset in which young people entering the labor market, you know, maybe they're not making ends meet immediately. Maybe they're not being paid very much. It's a bit like training. It's a bit like going to school or university. At university, we don't pay students to write their essays. Uh so, if you're just learning the job, really the employer is doing you a service as much as you're doing them a service. So, I I'd like to incentivize businesses doing it. But I think some big grand government scheme of we're going to create from Whitehall 10,000, 100,000, a million apprenticeships is bound to end in failure. So, the government should be setting the backdrop, the tone, the mood music of the market, the rules of the market, letting business get on with it.

[00:03:18]And unfortunately, they're making it harder and harder for businesses to get on with it. That's why we're seeing this with unemployment, and that's why growth really still remains on the floor. Mhm.

[00:03:27]Mark, we hear so much from young people themselves about how difficult it is to get any work experience at all. Even schools have stopped doing work experience now. And so, obviously, it becomes even more risky for employers to take them on if they've got no track record. Do you think as well as possibly problems with the minimum wage, there are also problems with regulation, health and safety? Man, I know from personal experience, 15-year-olds just can't get jobs anymore. And that's a really important period of time when they could have a Saturday job, be learning good skills, and getting ready for the workplace.

[00:03:57]Yes, we've become I agree with you, Miriam. We've basically built in a set of rules which have become extraordinarily risk-averse. Uh I mean, I can remember we we did some work in my with my former employer with lots of young people, but you need all sorts of checks to make sure that, you know, endless checks to make sure that nobody's got a bad record and all of the rest of it. And on occasions, I was even tempted to sort of shrug my shoulders and to say, "Is this really worth the candle?" Also, bear in mind the government are bringing in this so-called employers' rights bill. So, if you take on an employee, you'll also be thinking, "Supposing I fall out with them? My god, I could end up in court. I could end up having to pay them a fortune because it hasn't worked out after two or three months, and they'll accuse me of sexual discrimination or race discrimination or god knows what else." So, we have become far, far too risk-averse. And on young people, and you're mentioning that about work experience, Miriam, I mean, I would like to build that in automatically into a school's curriculum. That when you become, I don't know, 13, 14, 15, 16, you do a bit of time working at a local company just as part of your growing experience.

[00:05:01]We're doing the wrong thing by saying everybody's got to stay in education to 18, and really everybody's then got to go to university. I actually think when you're 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, we need to give you some real experience at the coal face, at work. And we seem to be retreating from that, thereby turning out graduates age 21 who potentially have no experience of any real workplace whatsoever. All of that culminates in these very dismal statistics we're seeing today. Mhm. And it's it's it's just the worst time, isn't it, for young people?

[00:05:33]So many of them are not even in in no form of education. What do we call them? NEETs. Not Not in employment, education, or training. It's a desperate failure of the state and private enterprise for these young people who were let down so badly during COVID. We should never have shut the schools down, either.

[00:05:51]Yeah, I think that's right, Andrew. I mean, it is terrible what young folk have gone through, you know, especially if you were at school or hoping to enter the labor market when we had the extraordinary long lockdowns. We have an incredibly disillusioned youth base, really, in the whole of the United Kingdom. And I think young people are also scratching their heads, sort of thinking, "You know what? Even if I really do apply myself to it, even if I do work really hard, have I ever got any chance of being able to afford a house?"

[00:06:20]Probably not. I'll be in my 40s, 50s, or 60s before I can get a mortgage because property prices are so high. So, you've got the the perfect storm, unfortunately, for young people, and we've got to correct it fast because all of the evidence shows if you're out of the labor market for a long time, the knock-on effects of this for the rest of your life are terrible. Okay, if you're out for a few weeks or a few months even between jobs, but if it becomes the norm in your life that you're one of these NEETs, not in education or training or or apprenticeships, then this is a disaster. You may well have a generation of people who just never get used to working, who just consider it alien, really, to be in a regular job and climbing the career ladder. So, the statistics look bad today, but the long-run impact of this in 5 or 10 years' time, I'm afraid, could be even worse unless we very quickly change track.

[00:07:15]Mark Littlewood, thank you so much for your time this morning.