Young people with anxiety and ADHD to be offered taxpayer-funded jobs at Boots

Thousands of long-term unemployed young people will be given jobs at firms like Boots and John Lewis, paid for by the Government in a bid to get them off benefits. Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden said 90,000 fully-funded jobs for 18 to 24-year-olds will be created by 2029 through the Government’s Jobs Guarantee scheme, as part of its £2.5bn drive to tackle youth unemployment. The roles will see firms given funding to pay young people at the minimum wage for up to 25 hours a week for six months, with the hope that the placements will lead to longer-term employment. While the roles will not be exclusively for young jobseekers suffering from mental health and other conditions such as ADHD, there has been a sharp rise in the number of people aged 24 and under claiming disability and unemployment benefits, citing ill health. Shorts Nearly a quarter – around 250,000 – of young people who are Not in Education, Employment, or Training (Neet) are estimated to have mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety, according to Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) data. McFadden said he hoped the newly-created jobs would offer young people an alternative to suffering ‘in isolation’ with mental health problems. He told The i Paper: “There are of course more instances of mental health conditions being cited in the benefit system and the labour market. My response is [that] work is part of the answer. Work is good for you. Bad for your mental health is just sitting at home isolated. “So, I see this not only as an economic thing, but as a response to greater instances of mental health problems for young people. The last thing we want to see is a diagnosis of problems leading to lifelong benefits. We need to respond to it with opportunity instead.” Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden with Boots staff in Nottingham. McFadden said he was ‘proud’ to work with ‘great British businesses’ to give young people an opportunity to work (Photo: Joe Giddens/PA) The number of Neets has risen in the UK since the Covid-19 pandemic and surpassed one million for the first time since 2014 earlier this year. Alan Milburn, the Government’s youth unemployment tsar, is due to give his final recommendations on how to help young Neets this autumn, having previously stated a “youth unemployment catastrophe” is being “driven by anxiety, depression, ADHD and autism”. Visiting Nottingham to meet a group of newly-hired Boots employees, who have been given warehouse, customer service and administration roles under the Jobs Guarantee scheme, McFadden said the policy is “about giving young people hope.” Asked what he thought of claims that young people today are often not “work-ready” and appear to be suffering more with their mental health, McFadden said it was important to be wary “of the siren song of nostalgia”. “If we rewind the clock in X number of years, were they always ‘work-ready’ in the past? I suspect maybe not,” the Work and Pensions Secretary said. “There’s always been a certain amount of training and teamwork that have had to be taught when someone starts a job.” What happens when the six-month trial period ends? The young workers who greeted McFadden in Nottingham are some of the first to have been supported from long-term unemployment into jobs by the scheme. At present, the Jobs Guarantee sees the Government fund the wages of young people who have been unemployed for more than 18 months. However, after the six-month placement is over, there is no guarantee of employment. McFadden said that he is hopeful that many of the young people will retain their jobs and added that six months’ experience of “work and setting the alarm clock and the discipline” of being in a job would increase their chances of future employment. Could the scheme be expanded? In terms of location, the Government’s Jobs Guarantee has been rolled out in areas with some of the highest levels of youth unemployment. These include: Birmingham and Solihull East Midlands, Greater Manchester, Hertfordshire and Essex, Central and east Scotland, South-east and south-west Wales. From November, the scheme will be expanded to all eligible 18-24-year-olds on universal credit who have been looking for work for 18 months. At present, The i Paper understands it will not be extended to older age groups. However, the DWP does currently have specialist work coaches for older people. Will young people lose their benefits if they turn down placements? Under current universal credit rules, anyone who refuses a suitable job offer or training opportunity without what the DWP deems to be a “good reason” – such as sudden illness or caring responsibilities – can have their benefits sanctioned. Speaking during the visit, McFadden said, “We do want to get a benefit bill down, but we want to do it by putting work and opportunity at the heart of what we’re doing,” he added. “When we create opportunities like the ones that you’ve seen today, we expect young people to engage with those opportunities,” he said. “That seems to me a fair deal from the point of view of the state, the individual, the taxpayer.” Is the scheme handing taxpayers’ cash to wealthy firms? McFadden stressed that while young people are working as part of the scheme, they will not be receiving their benefits and that he was “proud” to work with “great British businesses” to give them an opportunity to work. However, it is true to say that retail giants such as Boots and John Lewis and logistics firm OCS will receive direct reimbursements using taxpayers’ cash in order to pay the employees. Boots is a multi-billion-pound international company owned by the New York-based private equity firm Sycamore Partners. The high street brand recorded a post-tax profit of £261m last year. John Lewis is a British company owned in a trust on behalf of all its permanent employees, who are known as partners, and it also posted a profit of £134m last year. When asked what he would say to critics who wonder why the Government is supporting businesses to employ young people, McFadden replied: “Because we’re interested in opportunity and in changing young people’s lives for the better.” He said that it would be wrong for the Government to “stand back, fold our arms, and say this has nothing to do with us.” McFadden added that under the previous Conservative government, “there was no jobs guarantee in place, there were no extra 300,000 work experience placements, and youth apprenticeship starts were on a downward slope. These are all things which [Labour] put into place in the last year, and I think we’ve got a responsibility.”