Cutting welfare to pay for work support is all wrong

Priya Sahni-Nicholas on a proposal by Alan Milburn to help those not in education, employment or training. Plus letters from Ruth Lister and Alan Coppin

Alan Milburn correctly identifies that the nation’s 1 million young people not in education, employment, or training (Neet) represent a crisis of “youth detachment” deeply intertwined with mental ill health (Cut benefits to fund work support for young people, says Neet review author Alan Milburn, 18 October).

However, his proposal to cut welfare benefits to fund employment support both misdiagnoses the problem and points to a solution that will worsen it.

Framing welfare as something that is “plunging far too many young people into a life on benefits” ignores the fact that nearly half of Neet young people do not claim benefits.

The modern social security system is experienced as a regime of surveillance and scrutiny rather than a safety net. Paternalistic approaches that treat structural disadvantage as a personal failure actively drive vulnerable young people away from public institutions. Squeezing benefit safety nets further will deepen inequality, increase mistrust and worsen the problem, not alleviate it.

Rather than robbing Peter to pay Paul, we need the government to invest directly in reducing inequality. Creating the conditions for young people to thrive requires a fairer economic model that eradicates poverty and tackles gross disparities in income, wealth and power.

Health and employment support funding must come from progressive taxation on extreme wealth and corporate profits, not from threatening to withdraw support and further impoverishing already underresourced and vulnerable people.

We need government action that actively reduces inequality and builds security, giving every young person the structural foundation required to live a good life. Priya Sahni-Nicholas Co-executive director, Equality Trust

Thank you, Frances Ryan, for the call to arms in defence of our social security system (The right’s scrounger rhetoric dominates the benefits debate. Labour must fight back – and win, 16 October). But while it’s true that the right’s attack has been largely focused on disabled people’s benefits, the underlying hostility to social security and those reliant on it runs wider and deeper.

Fuelled by false claims that spending is out of control, the calls for cuts are relentless. And any attempt to start repairing the damage wreaked by the previous government’s cuts and restrictions – for instance, through the recent abolition of the two-child limit – are vilified with the kind of rhetoric she warns against. Cutting benefits to promote jobseeking is a false economy, as research suggests that impoverished people are ill-placed to seek and gain employment, and the costs are likely to fall elsewhere, including on the NHS.

The fightback needs to emphasise that social security, adequately financed, is both an essential weapon in combating poverty (including child poverty) and, as the name suggests, a key element in any strategy to promote the financial security of a wider population at a time of widespread insecurity. Ruth Lister Labour, House of Lords

Your article (Who exactly will be affected by the UK review of benefits for young people?, 20 October) again uses the term “Neets”. When I chaired the young people’s social inclusion charity Cities in Schools, we recognised that a new name was needed. Interbrand gave us Include, free of charge, with a modern logo: a lowercase “i” with a jagged line running through it, positive yet honest about the challenges our young people faced. The name mattered. It shaped how those young people saw themselves, and how others saw them.

Neet does the opposite. It defines young people by what they are not: in education, employment or training. Surely a government with all the resources at its command can find a less negative, less stigmatising term for the young people we need to help build a future. Alan Coppin Bourne End, Buckinghamshire