“UK minimum wage is raising youth unemployment, Bank of England’s Mann says” – Reuters, Feb 15th 2026
Do you remember your first crappy job? Today’s young people would wish for half your luck, writes Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian, Feb 20th 2026:
This week, unemployment rates for 18- to 24-year-olds hit a high not seen outside the pandemic since 2015. School leavers are now competing for work stacking shelves or pulling pints with overqualified new graduates who can’t find graduate jobs, at a time when pubs, shops and cafes don’t seem to be hiring. Even those employers strong enough to have survived lockdown routinely complain that it’s getting too expensive to hire staff – especially young ones.
The Centre for Policy Studies thinktank calculates that it will cost 26% more to hire an 18- to 20-year-old by this spring than it did in 2024. That reflects government decisions taken for perfectly good reasons, including hiking employers’ national insurance to fund the NHS, plus two chunky rises to the minimum wage for the under-20s (now £10 an hour) in line with manifesto promises to level it up with the higher adult rate (now £12.21) over the course of a parliament. No matter how noble the motive, once it costs the same to hire four teenage Starmers as it once did to hire five, there are likely to be consequences. Yet until this week, when an internal Labour argument about whether they could be inadvertently pricing young people out of work spilled on to newspaper front pages, political debate over why so many young people don’t have jobs has mostly involved blaming them for being anxious snowflakes. Injury, meet insult.
I am truly, non-sarcastically impressed that Ms Hinsliff and a few other left-wing commenters are now willing to admit that “there are likely to be consequences” to increasing the minimum wage. Hearing that word, “consequences”, enter left-wing discussions of workers’ pay is like a glimpse of a little mammalian form scurrying through the dust kicked up by a brontosaurus.
” . . . decisions taken for perfectly-good reasons . . . ”
And there you have it. In a nutshell. The reasons were perfectly-good, therefore the consequences . . . well, can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, you know. Sure, we made decisions which directly and predictably ruined employment prospects for millions of young people of modest skills and no experience – but our reasons were perfectly-good!
llater,
llamas
Wages are a price – the price of various forms of work. Prices need to be determined by supply-and-demand NOT government edicts.
If prices are determined by government edicts (now called “laws”) then you will get shortages of goods (including housing) and unemployed people. Increasing regulations on employment also causes unemployment – and calling these regulations “rights” makes no difference.
This is basic economics – and people who claim not to know this (or who deny it) are either incredibly ignorant – or lying.
Finis.
Missing from the argument is also:
Why pay a British citizen 10 pounds an hour (American keyboard, don’t have the pound sign) plus taxes, plus healthcare, plus any other fees and responsibilities that attend a legal hire, when they can just hire an illegal alien and pay them 6 or 8 pounds an hour cash and skip all the rest?
I don’t know…Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe illegals get so many public perks and benefits at the British citizen’s expense that working under the table in menial jobs isn’t worth their while?
Either way…sucks to be young in the Diverse Kingdom these days.
This is basic economics – and people who claim not to know this (or who deny it) are either incredibly ignorant – or lying.
Paul, embrace the power of “AND” – and as minimum wage increases often happen when an election is pending, I think you can toss-in “Interested Motives”…
And I suffered the effects of this common governmental “Raise the minimum wage – For the working poor – So they’ll vote for us” scourge myself. I was ‘president’ (note the small “P”) of a club, one place I worked. We had paid attendants, and minimum wage was ~$3.30 an hour at the time, IIRC (yes, I’m dating myself…). We had a steadily-rising $4,700 in the bank for a club with only the attendant wages and an occasional small tool purchase for expenses, and I often pondered what else I should be buying to give the members more value for their money. Over the space of eight months the minimum wage went up twice, to $4.50; and the club rapidly devolved to a steadily-shrinking $thousand in the bank and barely staying open.
And the minimum-wage earners naturally celebrate an increasing minimum wage; but as their employers get crushed by overheads, too many of them find-out the hard way that the true minimum wage is $0. It’s been well documented on the U.S. Left Coast where progressive governments are always doing this.
Y. Knott – you make a lot of good points in your comment, thank you for making them.
In Kettering, and other towns in England, there are plenty of jobs – one can work every day of the week, all hours of the day, the trouble is they are all jobs for “volunteers” – no matter how hard you work, you are not PAID.
The minimum wage edict (“law”) prevents many people getting PAID jobs – but it does not stop people working for NOTHING, which people are expected to do.