Prince Charles: 'Up to one million young people need urgent help'
Derren Hayes
Monday, September 28, 2020
The Prince of Wales has highlighted the impact the Covid-19 pandemic is having on young people’s prospects and opportunities, warning that up to one million could need “urgent help”.
Prince Charles, founder and president of The Princes Trust, a charity supporting disadvantaged young people, said the uncertainty created by the pandemic is particularly difficult for young people as entry-level jobs have been hit hardest by redundancies.
He made his comments in an article in The Daily Telegraph to mark The Princes Trust helping one million people since it was founded 45 years ago.
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Funding Focus: Coronavirus funding
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"Over all these years since the Trust was launched, there has never been an easy time,” he wrote. “However, there has never been a time as uniquely challenging as the present, when the pandemic has left perhaps another million young people needing urgent help to protect their futures. The task ahead is unquestionably vast, but it is not insurmountable.
"My Trust has a proven record of helping young people into jobs and training, keeping them motivated, confident and skilled during periods of unemployment. Working with employers, supporters and communities, my Trust will continue to give young people the lifeline they need.”
The Prince, who set up the Trust with his severance pay from the navy, likened today’s challenges to those facing young people in the mid-1970s.
"In the mid-1970s, when I left the Royal Navy, youth unemployment was one of the pressing issues of the time,” he wrote. “The problem, as always, was not merely the lack of opportunity represented by joblessness, it was also the destructive hopelessness that filled the void that work should have occupied.
“It seemed to me that we should do something to try to make a difference, however small. If the impersonal statistics could not be changed, perhaps the lives of at least some of the individuals those figures represented could be changed for the better.
“At the time, we did not know how many people we could help, or for how long, but we were determined to help some and, above all, to take calculated risks in order to do so.”
The Prince highlighted the support the trust is already providing disadvantaged young people through its Young People’s Relief Fund, which it set up in the early days of the pandemic.
Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show 76,000 more young people were unemployed in the three months to the end of July than in the same time period as last year.
In total 560,000 young people aged 16 to 24, were out of work during those three months, the Labour Market Overview for September 2020 states.