Teignbridge Matters: A Future for our Young People

Read Anne Marie’s views in her weekly column; an advertisement sponsored by Conservative supporters.

A Future for our Young People

Our young people and our young families deserve better – they deserve a real future. We don’t just have an economic crisis, we have a jobs crisis and the young are particularly affected. At the last count, there were 947,000 unemployed young people aged between 16 and 24. Many want to work but can’t. It’s about getting the right education and making it easier to employ young people, not harder.

Too many young graduates are finding themselves in an overcrowded marketplace with little prospect of finding employment. At the same time there is a lack of real skills training, which means that those who don’t go to university and instead choose a trade are left struggling to find an apprenticeship. And with the recession, the unskilled jobs many young people depend upon as they find their way in life, are just not there.

So instead of just Job Seekers Allowance let’s get youngsters real advice from a professional whose role is to find people jobs and who gets paid by results. Let’s offer youngsters the opportunity of a work pairing with a sole trader for six months. During this time they could get paid, by the government but through the business, a little bit more than the benefit they would be claiming anyway. Let’s offer businesses incentives to take on apprentices and introduce a programme of pre-apprenticeship training so the business doesn’t have to bear the cost of developing the basic skills they will need.

More apprenticeships, more further education and more easy-to-access, better focused, vocational training could make a significant difference. And let’s get these offered here in Teignbridge - at a local college.

Getting a foot on the housing ladder

First-time buyers face a crisis of affordability, with many being priced out of the market and 1.8 million families on waiting lists. A housing crash with tens of thousands of repossessions and one-in-four mortgage-holding homeowners in negative equity only added to the problem. This is the grim reality of our housing market. And Teignbridge’s record for house building is lamentable.

What could we do? Incentivise building by matching Teignbridge’s council tax take for each new house built for six years – with special incentives for affordable housing; relax the rules that prevent thousands of habitable empty properties being used to house those on waiting lists; enable members of the public to identify vacant government land that should be available for house-building. There are plenty of measures to take.

We could also strengthen shared ownership options and ensure that shared ownership buyers get access to reasonable mortgages instead of being treated as sub-prime borrowers asked to pay extortionate interest rates. We have to find ways of giving our youngsters a chance to get a foot on the housing ladder. They are our future and they need homes.

And those bankers…..

The banks have to understand that we are all in this together. The money that taxpayers have provided to support bank lending must not be diverted into significant cash bonuses. George Osborne has called on the Treasury and the FSA to combine forces and stop retail banks, who lend money direct to business, paying out profits in significant cash bonuses. The cash that would have been paid out should then be put into bank’s balance sheets explicitly to support new lending. If a bank is propped up by the taxpayer, this should be a condition of that support. Put simply – don’t pay bonuses – lend the cash to businesses instead!

Next time… A future for retail

Getting in touch

Please do feel free to get in touch at annemarie@annemariemorris.co.uk or 01626 368277. You can text me on 07712 004733 and follow what I am doing on my website: www.annemariemorris.co.uk. I would love to meet you at our next event– see www.newtonabbotconservatives.org.uk