Young Britons are swapping hard work for handouts

Telegraph

7 hours ago

Young people aren't idiots. Hard work doesn't, as they've realised, lead to guaranteed success.
Just 16pc of the students who have been polled by charity The 93% Club believe that it's the hardest working or most talented who land the top jobs. Most – 72pc – instead believe career success simply boils down to who you know. Why slog away, many will conclude, if hard work gets you nowhere.
Most have already clocked that the old way of doing things – work hard, buy a house – is a distant memory. Almost half a million more young people are living at home with their parents than they were two decades ago.
So in many ways it's understandable that so many enter adulthood feeling 'meh' about working life, with almost a million -year-olds neither working, training nor studying.
They might be unfairly perceived as entitled, overly fragile and eager to waste money on avocado and lattes.
But with wages stagnant, job vacancies falling and cost of living high – it's no wonder so many have concluded that hard work only pays off for the very privileged or very lucky.
All fair enough, especially for those whose education and early careers were upended by Covid lockdowns. But now it's time for young Britons to stop moping and move on.
Every generation has had its challenges, so this surrendering of any ambition is getting boring.
Older generations didn't stroll out of school and go straight into home ownership. There were often gruelling factory jobs from the age of 15, minimal holidays and poor living conditions to get through first. Hard work was always part of the deal.
Working hard at the start of a career has until recently been considered a given, but now it's almost fashionable among young workers to be seen doing the bare minimum.
Social media users are live-quitting their jobs on TikTok or dishing out advice on how to get away with doing as little as possible in a nine-to-five. Hospitality businesses which typically rely on young staff are struggling to hire those who just want to work from home, while the Lords have been told that unemployed youngsters 'on the internet 24 hours a day' now don't want to get out of bed for a salary of less than £40,000.
If young people seemed happy with all of this, then why not – older generations certainly have a thing or two to learn about work-life balance and putting any career stress into perspective. Nobody looks back on their life wishing they spent more time in the office and less time with their children, for example.
But rates of depression and anxiety among young people have been soaring in recent years, suggesting that rising unemployment or a deliberate lack of ambition isn't leaving anyone with a spring in their step. For many, this deliberate tapping out of adulthood won't feel like real freedom at all.
But young Britons aren't exactly flushed with choice. Last week we learnt that 274,000 jobs have been lost over the last 12 months. The Government is determined to change that, and is urging businesses such as care home operators to train up unemployed Britons instead of recruiting from overseas.
In reality, nothing will shift while hard work is considered a failure.
Geoff Butcher, who runs several care homes in the Midlands, told my colleague last month that most UK job applicants never turn up for interviews, while the few who do end up failing probation or quitting in the first three months.
'The majority of them just find it too hard work,' he said, adding that the benefit system is a large part of the problem; 'It's a way of life, kind of bumping along the bottom'. Many British workers simply don't fancy these demanding roles.
But the state cannot step in and give everyone a friction-free life, and nor should it. While the reasons for some young people wanting to snub hard work are understandable to an extent, giving in to a life of idleness can lead to depression, loneliness or – as former Tory chancellor Lord Hammond recently put it – a drift towards entitlement which can become hard to shake.
'The modern welfare state has turned from a culture of mutual self-help to a world that is based on rights,' he told The Telegraph recently.
''It's my right to be protected by the state.' 'It's my right to be fed and housed and clothed and provided for with healthcare and everything else, regardless of whether I contribute or not.' That's a very different cultural approach to the challenge of the balance of the state versus the individual's responsibility.'
Yet it's a hard cycle to break out of.
Those who have been out of work can lose confidence about going back. Hard work has become part of the culture war narrative, with Nigel Farage recently claiming that Reform voters are 'alarm clock' people who are up early and working hard.
In reality, underneath the apparent lack of ambition and apathy towards work, most young adults would like to be an 'alarm clock' person with somewhere to be. They just might need some extra help realising that.