At what age is a person no longer considered the responsibility of their parents? In the past, 18 was the obvious answer. But in our modern era of rising rents and graduates struggling to find work after university, it can seem as if young people are experiencing a kind of prolonged adolescence. Luckily for the youth, the Conservative Party has teased a modest proposal in the run-up to its conference. The headline idea is standard right-wing schtick – or, as the shadow work and pensions secretary Helen Whately euphemistically put it, “tough love”. Instead of Universal Credit, unemployed under-25s who are deemed fit to work would receive a “Get to Work Allowance” rather than the current benefits, requiring them to jump through various hoops to prove they are really trying to find a job. If they are still jobless after six months their allowance would be cut by 30 per cent.
The fact that the current Universal Credit system requires claimants to do much the same thing – show they are actively looking for work – does not seem to have troubled the party. Nor does the uncomfortable question of what happens if employers simply don’t want to hire inexperienced youngsters – an increasingly pertinent worry given the rate at which AI is destroying entry-level jobs. But no matter. So far, this is standard “tough on benefits” rhetoric like previous announcements on banning claimants from spending money on alcohol, designed to remind the Conservative base that it’s welfare scroungers who are bleeding the Treasury dry, and not, for example, a decade and a half of under-investment in critical infrastructure and skills combined with the totally foreseeable but recklessly unplanned-for burdens of an ageing population.
It’s the other part of the welfare proposal that takes the Tory policy from the merely misguided to the downright bizarre. While full details are yet to emerge, the party is briefing its intention to consider parents earnings and savings in their adult children’s welfare applications. The aim is to make those pesky Neets the responsibility of their parents rather than the state.
It’s hard to know where to start with this insanity. Is it worth pointing out, for example, that the Tories have been perfectly happy to treat 18-year-olds as full legal adults capable of making financial decisions that will last a lifetime when encouraging them to sign up for complex and badly designed student loans that the Treasury Committee has essentially deemed a mis-selling scandal?
This objection would, alas, fall on deaf ears, for young people really are not the intended Tory audience. But what about the boomer and Gen X parents suddenly on the hook if their children fail to be as productive as the Conservatives demand? Means-testing benefits is difficult, expensive and politically fraught. This is doubly true when the means-testing is new – just look at Labour’s disaster in trying to target the winter fuel allowance at pensioners who actually need it rather than some of the wealthiest people in the country.
The Tory line seems to be that the wealth built up by older generations – often thanks to booming house prices – should be untouchable when it comes to benefits for themselves, such as the winter fuel allowance of the triple-locked state pension (which, incidentally, makes up 42 per cent of the welfare bill) but is fair game when it comes to benefits for their adult children. It’s not just unworkable, it’s generationally incoherent.
Imagine if it worked the other way around, with pensions and social care entitlement determined not by the income and wealth of the person receiving them, but that of their offspring. Never mind that said offspring might have other ideas about how to spend that money (as, indeed, parents of Neets may do). It would spark fury among old and new alike. And this suggestion should do.
It goes without saying that most parents will want to help their children in any way they can. Indeed, many already do – around a third of the 900,000 Neets in Britain are “hidden” from the state because they do not claim benefits and are supported in other ways, presumably by their parents. But so many of the issues limiting young people’s life chances are structural, from poor mental health (this is, after all, the generation locked away for years at a formative point in their lives during Covid) to the lack of opportunities. Putting the burden of solving all that not on the state that created those conditions but on desperate parents is both cruel and counterproductive.
It is also deeply infantilising. The Conservative Party wants young people to show initiative and take responsibility for their future, but at the same time is writing them off as their parents’ problem. If they don’t consider under-25s full members of society, what possible incentive do those under-25s have to prove them wrong?
The Tory party is dying among younger people – that is, anyone under 65. It is normal in political conference season to announce things to fire up your base, to hell with everybody who don’t already vote for you. But young people have ears, eyes and memories. And right now, a party that claims to be serious is championing a policy that will do nothing to bring the welfare bill down or fix the structural causes of youth unemployment but instead tells an entire cohort of voters it doesn’t consider them real people.
[Further reading: How to solve the Neets crisis]
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