Jamie Gollings is the Deputy Research Director at the Social Market Foundation
Rishi Sunak’s proposal for a ‘National Service’ scheme is wrong on two counts, and right on one. Getting policymakers thinking about enhancing young people’s sense of community and service is good. But this is the wrong programme, presented with the wrong posture. Rather than weekends of enforced volunteering, civic work placements of up to a year would be more impactful. And rather than waving the big stick of ‘mandatory participation’, there are more than enough ‘carrots’ to make such schemes voluntary and appealing to young people.
The form of national service proposed by the Conservatives is a volunteering programme dressed as a military one. After all, if there are only 30,000 places for young people to work with the armed forces, then over 95 per cent of the cohort will be doing the volunteering option, which requires one weekend a month over a year. Sunak is right to explore this area. The UK is an outlier among its closest peers – not in lacking a military national service, but in lacking a civic one.
The US, Germany, France and Italy all have programmes that give tens of thousands of young people each year the chance to start their careers in a field that gives back to their communities. Participants spend between 6 and 18 months getting paid to work in sectors of vital importance, from social care to disaster relief.
At the Social Market Foundation, we are currently working on a project that has us interviewing nearly 200 twenty-somethings. There are two things that we hear from them time and time again. One is that they wish they understood more about the career options open to them when they were leaving school. The other is that they lack the networks to understand and get a leg up on different job routes.
Long-term civic service schemes like those seen internationally can address both of these needs. Working with David Blunkett and others, I helped to design a pilot programme inspired by those initiatives: UK Year of Service, delivered by nearly 100 organisations ranging from the British Red Cross and National Citizen Service to local youth clubs. It has given hundreds of 18-24-year-olds up to a year of paid work experience and training. Participants have helped their communities in various ways: building flood defences, giving targeted mentoring to children especially hit by the pandemic, or helping their neighbourhood to cut down their energy usage.
In addition to the work placements, the participants are brought together to network and learn about their peers’ roles. This means that, even if participants do not wish to build a career out of their placement, they will have been exposed to numerous other purpose-driven jobs that they may never have heard about. The chance to meet people from diverse backgrounds is also valuable. The resulting employability benefits have been impressive – over half of those on the UK Year of Service pilot programme were unemployed and on benefits before taking part. Following the scheme, over 80 per cent had begun employment, education, or training.
What are the costs of such a scheme? Sunak has earmarked £2.5 billion a year for his national service programme. For such a budget, over 125,000 young people could instead be put through a programme like the UK Year of Service, providing support to those at risk of unemployment or unsure about their next steps, helping around a sixth of the 18-year-old cohort, assuming that participants work for 9-month placements, are paid for 40 hours a week, and at the national living wage.
That also assumes three-quarters of the roles are in public services, with all of the wages covered by the state, and that one-quarter of the roles are in the third sector, with half of the wages covered by the state. We also imagine that £4,000 will be needed per participant to cover additional support and training. If three-quarters of roles in the public sector were filling existing public sector vacancies, then these wages would already be covered in other parts of the public sector budget. There could then be up to 400,000 roles supported a year.
Rather than dragging young people out to volunteer every weekend, or tying up the military training these conscripts, they could instead be helping to buttress our public services and contribute their passion to tackling some of our biggest challenges.
