A job, a house and kids used to be a ‘normal’ life. Now it’s a distant dream

Young people have never had it so bad. No, really. Unless they have particularly wealthy family, young people can expect to be worse off than their parents.

This is the first time in history that downward economic and social mobility has become the norm, and it signals that our social contract – which dictates that you will be rewarded if you work hard, do as you’re told and pay your taxes – is broken.

Today, a landmark report from Alan Milburn, the former Blair-era health secretary, confirms that one in six (1.24 million) 16 to 24-year-olds will be unemployed by 2031 unless urgent action is taken.

The unflattering acronym for these young people is Neet – not in education, employment or training. And, according to shameful official data from the Office for National Statistics published on the same day as Milburn’s report, there are more than one million of them.

This comes alongside data from UK Finance – the trade body for the finance industry – which tells us that buying a home with a mortgage is now as unaffordable as it was in 2008, before interest rates were nailed to the floor.

The average age of a first-time buyer is now 34, and over half of the people who do manage to buy a home received help from the Bank of Mum and Dad. It is now clear, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that becoming a homeowner will require some magical thinking on the part of young people without family wealth, because the odds are totally stacked against them.

Today’s young adults have been failed over and over and over again. They’ve been failed by politicians who sat back through the 2010s and not only failed to address low housebuilding rates and skyrocketing house price inflation, but cheered it on.

They’ve been failed by a welfare system that, as I have found out by interviewing people across the country, discourages work: the more you earn, the less Housing Benefit you get, making it unaffordable to rent and work in many places.

They are now being failed by a jobs market where entry level positions for both graduates and people who don’t go to university are disappearing. Compared to the start of the last century, there are fewer low and mid-level jobs available.

Make no mistake. It is not only our housing ladder that has collapsed. Our career ladder has too. Over recent months, I’ve been talking to Milburn, visiting job centres, and also talking to Gen Z – including a poll of 6,000 of them- as part of a podcast series for The Rest Is Politics.

Like Milburn, I am deeply troubled by what they’ve said. I spoke to a young woman in her 20s who graduated from Cambridge with a first class degree, who is now living at home with her parents in Ilford and struggling to find work. I heard from a young man from Essex who said he applied for more than a hundred jobs and often heard nothing back. I met an 18-year-old in Birmingham who wanted to be an electrical engineer but was told government funding for his training was not available until he turned 19 and a half years old.

None of these problems are new. They’ve been brewing since the 2008 financial crisis, which saw millennials experience a recession, soaring house prices and, worse still, more than a decade of stagnant wage growth, which saw any rises in earnings more or less wiped out by inflation.

Young people are the future. We need them to be happy, ambitious and working. Not least because their well-being benefits everyone else, but, more cynically, because if they aren’t paying taxes and starting families of their own, then, frankly, we won’t have enough people paying tax to support the welfare state – which includes the NHS and our pensions – in years to come.

After 2008, politicians ignored my generation, millennials. They turned a blind eye to the scarring effect that the recession had on their wages and life chances. Falling birth rates and rising instances of mental health problems are the price we pay for that.

If you are unemployed when you are young, research says you are more likely to be unemployed throughout your life. Exclusive polling conducted by Ipsos for my series included a shocking fact: more than 70 per cent of Gen Z are pessimistic about the economy and think things will get worse.

They can see and feel what older people have tried to gloss over: Britain has experienced a complete system failure. As Milburn warns, the health, education and welfare systems no longer work to support young people as they enter adulthood. Add housing to the mix and you have nothing short of a hostile economic environment for the young.

That armageddon scenario where the state spends more on benefits than it has coming in in tax receipts is a very real risk for Britain because we know that Millennials have struggled to buy homes and start families, causing our birth rate to fall. If Gen Z continue this trend, we are in big, big trouble.