Youth Unemployment

Lord Bishop of Chester Excerpts

Thursday 14th June 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Chester]

My Lords, I gladly support what has been said in the debate so far. I particularly pay tribute to the brilliant way in which the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, introduced the debate. The noble Lord, Lord Roberts, is a Methodist minister and I hope that he will not find anything tribal in my contribution from these Benches. Indeed, at one point he might even find me singing the same hymn to the same tune, which will be wonderful.

I wish to approach the issue in not quite the same way as other noble Lords have so far but simply from its moral dimension. I shall try to tease out how to approach it in that way. Nurturing the next generation is arguably the most important task and challenge facing any society. Of course, this does not apply only to humankind but is true throughout the created world. In the animal kingdom it is rather hard-wired. One has to think only of the way in which a mother bird or a lioness will defend its young, or the incredible feats that birds undertake to migrate to their proper breeding grounds. As I say, it is hard-wired into the rest of the animal kingdom.

One of the problems of being human is that we have an ability to override our hard-wiring in a way that is not open to those who do not have the precious commodity of human freedom. Let me put this in terms which may resonate here and there in the Chamber. We have been placed in the garden of paradise, but we have eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I could be tempted to add, “and there is no helping us”, but I shall leave that thought on the tip of my tongue. Let me put it in different terms. Human life, uniquely in the created world, for all its glory and beauty, is prone to a certain dislocation that is unique to human society. Nature red in tooth and claw is complicated for us by the moral possibilities, or indeed immoral possibilities, that human beings have uniquely to confront. That can produce the Mother Teresa, the Gandhi and the Mandela, or it can produce the Hitler, the Stalin and the Pol Pot in equal measure. I say this because I believe that the phenomenon of youth unemployment presents at its heart a moral challenge. Of course it has social and economic aspects on which we will probably concentrate in the debate, but unless it is regarded first and foremost as a moral challenge, I suspect that what we come up with will tend to be superficial, sticking-plaster solutions.

I shall address two of the moral dimensions which are quite tricky to get right, and I should like to hear the Minister’s response to these two issues at the end of the debate. The first is what I would call intergenerational equity, a point just touched on by the noble Lord, Lord Roberts. Let us not underestimate the great change that has happened. The younger generation of today is facing a much more difficult time than my generation did. This is a reversal after several generations where the younger generation had it easier than the preceding one. We have now gone backwards. When I left university 43 years ago—incidentally, at the same time and place as the Minister—the thought did not occur to me that there would not be a job when I graduated. It simply was not on our radar. How times have changed since then. The thought that, in my 20s, I might have to go back to my parental home because there was nowhere else to live would hardly have occurred to me then. Given the reversal we face today, life is tough for the younger generation in a unique way.

My question is this: does the older generation, my generation, feel a responsibility towards the younger generation to do whatever needs to be done to address and alleviate the deep social evil of large-scale youth unemployment? I return to the issue of the retirement age. I understand entirely the reasons for abolishing compulsory retirement ages, but as we have heard, there is a certain conflict between doing that and having a society with large-scale youth unemployment. Ideally, of course, there would be no conflict, but rights often have to be balanced. Indeed, the term “right” has an absolute sound to it and we do not think that it must be qualified and balanced against other rights. If we were in a period of good and steady economic growth, perhaps I would not be too anxious on this point, but if we are in a period of endemic low growth, my fear is that the rights we give to older people to work as long as they like comes into conflict with the proper needs of the younger generation. How, as a society, do we address this?

Other societies deal with this in their own ways. In other parts of the Anglican communion, young people are simply found work within the extended family—the village community—so it is managed. I know of communities in this country where young people in a particular ethnic group or community are found work, because that is what the community does through the ethos of the extended family. We seem to have lost that, so how do we gather it back as a society nationally? We are facing a very difficult issue.

My second and concluding moral question concerns what I call international equity—equity between nations—and I refer here to the free movement of labour within the European Union. Again, I am entirely in favour of it in principle, but because of the role of English in the international world now, there will tend to be more people wanting to exercise the right to work in England than in some other countries. That is simply the way the world is. What happens, then, if there is serious competition for jobs with our own young people raised in this country? What research is being undertaken to look at this problem, to see whether it is a problem and, if so, how to address it? We cannot simply carry on thinking that it is too difficult an issue to confront.

I will end where the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, ended, with vacation jobs. One of the tragedies today is that there are so few of those sorts of jobs available to students and other people just to get some experience of work. In my generation, we all learned so much from that sort of work, getting our foot on the ladder. In my case, it was being a dustman. It was the easiest thing to do: work for six weeks emptying the bins and then with the money I would go and have a holiday. I spent six months of my life being a dustman. It taught me a great deal—and language I do not use much these days. No doubt the Minister will have his own story to tell.