Generally I don’t, but last week I stopped between meetings for a coffee in a café in one of those ex-industrial towns that’s plummeting back into decline, after the brief period of hope induced by pre-recession public investment.
It was tacky and a bit grubby round the edges, but the atmosphere and welcome were warm, even though I was an obvious misfit.
Squeezed in at the table next to me was a young man in hoodie and trackies, trying to feed scrambled egg to a very grumpy baby. My grandmotherly instincts kicked in and I tried to distract the baby with smiles and faces so dad, as I presumed he was, could sneak the food in.
He was grateful and we started to chat. I told him my daughter had a baby the same age. "Did he look after the baby full time?" I asked.
"No," he replied, nodding to the girl who had served me, "only when she works here – four mornings a week." He explained that he had left school at 16, tried to get jobs, had started but not completed various training courses and programmes and had now "with the recession and things being so bad" given up. "Maybe try again when the baby started school as things might be better then," he confided without much conviction.
He was 19 and to avoid being forced on "another useless scheme", which would mean they would have to pay for childcare when his partner worked, he had stopped claiming benefits in his own right. They lived off her benefits plus the money she earned cash-in-hand from the café. Effectively, this boy had disappeared.
I left there as angry and disheartened as I have ever been. For all the current talk of youth contracts, raising of the participation age and all the schemes that have gone before, we have failed these young people and in many cases their parents before them. For so many of them our schemes are useless, they lead nowhere and we have done little to deflect the impact of structural unemployment – intergenerational failure to address intergenerational unemployment. Surely to goodness it is time we started to get it right.
Fiona Blacke, chief executive, National Youth Agency fionab@nya.org.uk
