My first paid job was in a second-hand bookshop in the covered market in Bath. I was studying my A-Levels and was desperate to make some money of my own and stop relying on my parents.
I found the job the old-fashioned way: I saw a poster advertising for a Saturday job in the bookshop’s window. A weekend or so later, I was busy carrying armfuls of Agatha Christies, Patrick O’Brians, David Baldaccis, Ian Rankins, Margaret Drabbles, and numerous fantasy tomes — why are fantasy novels always so long? — up and down the little shop every Saturday, cherishing the £30 cash I received at the end of each day.
The shop is still there. It’s a little relic of the Bath I grew up in, which feels like a distant memory these days. Working there was a great experience. It brought money, yes, but also the intangible benefits of serving customers, engaging with the general public, and speaking to people from all walks of life, be they polite or rude, local or a foreign tourist, eccentric or familiar. I quickly found an additional job at another bookshop in town on Sundays — as the covered market kept traditional hours — and added another string to my bookselling bow.
This was an entirely normal experience for someone my age, back in the nearly-forgotten days of 2010. Almost everybody I knew from school also had weekend jobs. A girl in my year at school worked in the haberdashery opposite my bookstand in the market. The city’s supermarkets had an enjoyably friends-and-family feel, with familiar faces working on the tills at weekends and in the run up to Christmas. This isn’t the case so much anymore.
Since 2000, the number of 16- and 17-year old Brits with part time jobs has collapsed. According to official figures, fewer than one-in-five British youngsters have a job these days, compared to around half at the start of the century. This is rendering young people unemployable for their first full-time jobs after school and university, according to Alan Milburn, the Government’s “employment tsar”.
Policies that successive governments have chosen to implement over the last 25 years have made work less attractive to Britain’s youngsters
This is the latest sign in how the modern British economy does not work for young people. Young people are being squeezed out of the labour market and deprived of the chance to learn the ropes of the workplace and take some of those early steps from dependent adolescence into independent adulthood that a first job provides.
While some commentators blame Britain’s youngsters for being workshy, I believe the real culprit is — as usual — the government. A suite of policies that successive governments have chosen to implement over the last 25 years have made work less attractive to Britain’s youngsters and have made the idea of hiring an enthusiastic but untested sixth-former more trouble than it’s worth for Britain’s beleaguered employers.
The sour cocktail of minimum wage hikes, labour regulation, ballooning welfare spending, the expansion of higher education and mass immigration have all, in their own way, contributed to the declining job prospects of Britain’s young people.
The introduction of the minimum wage in 1998 did not precipitate the sort of unemployment crisis among lower wage workers than opponents of it expected at the time. The Government was fortunate enough that the British economy was growing healthily in the 1990s thanks to the legacy of Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson, and increases to the minimum wage were modest for the first decade or so of its existence. Until 2010, the annual increase in the minimum wage was small, between three and five percent, and the relatively sober recommendations of the Low Pay Commission were implemented without much fuss.
This changed in 2016 with the introduction of the National Living Wage by George Osborne. Although it was initially only applied to workers over the age of 25, the introduction of wages set explicitly by the Chancellor on Budget Day marked a crossing of the Rubicon. Since then Britain has embarked on a journey of government-mandated wage increases more reminiscent of a Bolivarian banana republic than a market economy. Inevitably, the age threshold dropped from 25 to 21 by 2024, and today the government is committed to ending the lower rate for those under 21. For the aforementioned sixth formers, the minimum wage has jumped dramatically as well. Today it stands at £8.00 an hour, just under double what it was in 2017. This increase has significantly outpaced inflation, which was around 35-40 percent in the same period. While these increases theoretically boost the buying power of younger workers, above-inflation wage increases are a huge disincentive against hiring them for employers, particularly those in thin-margin industries like hospitality.
Just as wages have crept up, so has regulation. The Employments Rights Act 2025 became law just before Christmas, imposing new obligations on employers which will affect younger workers. These include the effective end of zero hours contracts, the expansion of entitlement to statutory sick pay, and a much shorter qualifying period for unfair dismissal, reduced from two years to six months. As is often the case with labour regulation, these policies are implemented following outcry over a few edge cases of exploitation or abuse. While often well-intentioned — it is understandable to wish to ensure workers are offered regular hours, for example — one-size-fits-all regulations are often self-defeating. Instead of making workers more secure and better off, they disincentivise employers from hiring in the first place, especially as the costs associated with letting poor employees go increases. Current employees may enjoy greater security, but the lower flexibility for employers gums up the entire labour market, making people less likely to see new employment and employers less likely to expand their operations to take on more staff. If you have wondered why eating out in Britain is getting so expensive, this is partly why. Businesses which can rely on family networks to employ people informally can dodge the costs of many labour market regulations, those who employ people above board ultimately must pass on the costs to their customers. This is why steak and chips in London is usually a £40 meal these days.
While wages and regulation impose direct costs on employers and discourage the hiring of younger staff, other policies have contributed to this development indirectly. The rapid expansion of higher education from a relatively elite pursuit to around half the young population has delayed young people’s entry into the workplace. The significant increase in the welfare state, particularly eligibility for sickness benefits on mental health grounds, often approved without in-person assessments, offers a livelihood without needing to work. By the end of 2025 there were around 300,000 young people claiming Universal Credit without any requirement to work, and around one million people aged between 16 and 24 are in no form of education, employment, or training. Since the pandemic, the generosity of the welfare state has increased and many of the conditions applied to benefits have been softened. When free money is available — especially when one cribs from advice on Reddit or TikTok — it is hardly surprising that many choose to take it instead of punching in a timecard.
A flexible jobs market was once one of Britain’s great strengths. Today it is disappearing before our eyes
Mass immigration has made things worse for young British workers as well, exposing them to an essentially limitless pool of labour market competition. First, this meant tens of millions of potential workers from the expanded European Union. Since 2021, it has also included nearly one million more migrants on work visas and hundreds of thousands of international students who have taken advantage of being able to work in the UK for two years after graduation. These amount to an expansion in the labour market unprecedented in British history, and the dilution of opportunities for young people who find themselves competing for jobs with older and more experienced arrivals. Analysis by the Migration Advisory Committee, and other bodies, found that the growth of migrants in the labour market, especially in lower-skilled jobs, displaced British workers, particularly if the new arrivals have come from outside the EU. This displacement is likely to affect the sort of industries which traditionally provided young Brits with their first jobs.
While employers have no obligation to hire British youngsters, today British youngsters face a labour market stacked against them. The government’s jobs tsar should recommend the state take its fingers off the scales, rather than suggesting another subsidy scheme which will benefit nobody other than civil servants shuffling money around Whitehall. British society should also attempt to embrace informality and flexibility in the workplace again: so many opportunities in life come from chance encounters and happy accidents. A labour market regulated into submission cannot provide these. A flexible jobs market was once one of Britain’s great strengths. Today it is disappearing before our eyes. Changing course will be a difficult job, but we must get to work — for all our sakes, but especially for young people.
