Angry young unemployed a ticking time bomb

Many statistics showed deprivation and a lack of hope played a key role in the riots in Britain. Photo / AP

In Japan they call them freeters, an amalgamation of "freelance" and the German word for workers arbeiter. The Tunisians opt for hittistes, a slang Arabic phrase which roughly translates as people who lean against walls. In Britain they prefer NEETs, the term used to describe the depressingly swelling ranks of our young who are not in education, employment or training.

But whatever you call them and wherever you are, the youth unemployment time bomb is ticking and in Britain there are few signs of things getting better.

This week the Office of National Statistics released the latest employment figures from the past three months, showing the number of those out of work had risen by 114,000, to 2.57 million - the highest figure since October 1994. Youth unemployment fell just short of the feared 1 million mark at 991,000.

There is little dispute that failure to harness the energy of the younger generations is eating away at the foundations of all Britons' futures.

As Paul Brown, director of the youth charity The Prince's Trust, put it earlier this year: "Youth unemployment is like a dripping tap, costing tens of millions of pounds a week through benefits and lost productivity. And, just like a dripping tap, if we don't do something to fix it, it's likely to get much worse."

For the pessimists, the latest figures herald a return to two decades ago when the young were hit disproportionately hard and suffered for years afterwards.

"The 1980s recession was a generational disaster and there is a major risk of it happening all over again," says Richard Exell, a labour market expert at the Trades Union Congress. "Whatever interpretation economists might have as far as ordinary people are concerned, we are already in a double dip recession and young people are clearly one of the groups bearing the brunt of it."

The TUC's research has shown that those who were out of work for more than a year during the 1980s were more likely to struggle during this crisis and overall tended to earn less than those who got through the decade economically unscathed.

According to the ONS, the proportion of young people out of work is edging closer to 20 per cent, prompting headlines warning that one in five under-24s are out of work.

"I wouldn't for one moment want to give the impression that we haven't got economic difficulties or that it is easy for young people to find a job because it isn't," says Simon Briscoe, a former statistics editor at the Financial Times. "But I do think that when we hear people say one in five young people are unemployed it is terribly misleading."

That's partly down to the way the ONS publishes its statistics. The figures they release give youth unemployment as a percentage of the economically active but excludes the "inactive" - those in education. As the number of young seeking further education increases, the pool of potentially unemployed reduces but proportionately the number of unemployed (within that pool) increases. If you include those in education, the unemployment figure is closer to one in eight, rather than one in five, a number that is comparable to older age groups.

Statisticians such as Briscoe prefer to look at the bigger picture - but there is even less room for optimism there. "Whether the unemployed number hits one million or not is irrelevant really from a statistician's point of view," he says. "What's important is the overall trend which has shown youth unemployment steadily rising over the past six or seven years. That's the really scary statistic."

One only needs to look south and east of the Mediterranean to see what the end result of endemic youth unemployment can be.

The revolutions that have swept the region were largely led by shabaab - self-identified youth movements who were fed up with their lack of prospects in an area of the world where unemployment for their age group rests at 24 per cent, according to the International Labour Organisation. Their anger, was exacerbated by the corrupt and despotic rule of their leaders.

Prime Minister David Cameron has insisted Britain's recent riots had nothing to do with poverty. But numerous statistical analyses of the rioters have shown deprivation and a lack of hope played a key role.

Kevin Green, chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, says the Government could be more proactive at alleviating the crisis.

His organisation has lobbied for small and medium business to be given a two-year National Insurance tax breaks if they hire an under 24-year-old. "It would encourage employers to take a risk and hire someone younger and would cost significantly less than having them on benefits," he says.

Doing nothing is not an option. You only have to look at Tottenham, Hackney, Croydon and Manchester to see the alternative.

- INDEPENDENT