How 14 Years of Conservative Rule in the U.K. Pushed Young People Into Poverty

Binish Syed Qureshi was in high school when she felt the acute impact of the U.K.’s cost-of-living crisis. As a child of Pakistani immigrants, she grew up in the bustling neighborhood of Salford in South Manchester, where her parents took up working-class jobs like taxi driving to support a family of seven. Qureshi recalls a time when they couldn’t afford to pay £400 ($505) in fees to enroll her in the Duke of Edinburgh Award, a program aimed at helping young people develop leadership skills through volunteering and outdoor activities.

“It was one of those instances that made me think school was designed for rich kids, not working-class kids,” she says, “because my parents had to decide whether to feed my siblings or send me to school activities.”

Now on the cusp of 18, Qureshi has just finished her schooling, studying electrical engineering and electronics at a local college. She can’t afford to pursue higher education; instead, she works weekend shifts at a fast-food restaurant. “I’m honestly underpaid,” she says, before adding that she feels “a bit lost in life.”

In just over 10 days, Qureshi will cast her first-ever vote in the U.K.’s general election, taking place on July 4. “I can’t wait to vote,” Qureshi says enthusiastically—a stark contrast to many in her generation. A survey conducted by Techne UK for The Independent found that nearly 40% of Gen Zs and millennials have expressed voter apathy and don’t plan to vote in this election, believing that neither the Conservatives nor the Labour Party has addressed problems faced by young people today.

A growing body of research reveals that in the U.K., this age group has many justified grievances stemming from austerity, a set of policies pursued by Conservative-led governments between 2010 and 2019 that were aimed at reducing public spending through significant cuts to welfare. While Britain has a longstanding history of class inequality, experts say these grievances have loomed ever larger under the last 14 years of Conservative-party rule, resulting in a rise in youth unemployment, job scarcity, and a cost-of-living crisis, particularly for those from lower-income or “working class” backgrounds.

According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s cost of living tracker, 92% of households with a young person reported going without essentials between 2022 and 2023. Nine in 10 people between the ages of 15 and 24 now count having enough money to cover basic needs as an aspiration in life because of the challenge brought about by the cost-of-living crisis, according to another report by the 2024 British Youth Council Select Committee. And TSB's Money Confidence Barometer survey in December 2022 found that young people are seven times more likely than their grandparents to have taken out new or additional debt in the past 12 months, or expect to do so in the next 12 months. 

As a result, “young people are coming of age in the shadow of a system which wasn’t designed to support independence or a safe transition to adulthood,” states a report by the Royal Society of Arts titled Age of Insecurity. This has manifested in a growing mental health crisis, too. In January, The Prince's Trust NatWest Youth Index 2024 found that one in five young people in the U.K. missed school or work in the past year due to their mental health, with over half attributing this to the cost-of-living crisis.

Qureshi, who has lived this firsthand, says she felt particularly emboldened to vote after watching an interview on ITV News, during which Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stated he had gone without “lots of things” as a child. “All the young people I know have gone from wanting to make a living to barely surviving,” she says. “We’re just trying to get through each day, while Rishi Sunak is crying about how he didn’t get Sky TV.”

The Age of Insecurity report by the RSA found that 47% of young people in the U.K. are financially precarious today. To investigate the story behind these numbers, the report followed the lives of 12 individuals over the course of a year, concluding that their insecurity was driven by two factors: young people face a “young person premium,” or a higher cost of living just for being young, and young people are left with increasingly little collective security.

Like Qureshi, many respondents in the RSA report expressed anxiety over their futures. For example, 24-year-old Conor, who lives in London and works on the Civil Service Fast Stream, told the researchers, “In 10 years’ time I don’t think I’ll be doing anything different for the most part… Hopefully, [my] financial situation will improve, though I do have my concern that it could even get worse.”

These experiences are not unique, but rather the sum of long-term policies and actions that came after the 2008 global financial crisis, during which the U.K. government bailed out British banks at an estimated cost of £141 billion to prevent a complete collapse. In 2010, the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition implemented severe austerity measures by announcing the biggest cuts to state spending since World War II. It included significant cuts to social security, while over 900,000 public sector jobs were lost between 2011 and 2018.

These measures were intended to deliver growth to the economy over the long term, but a study conducted by Oxfam America found that the opposite has happened. That’s because the country was already experiencing rising income inequality since the 1980s, when a shift towards market-based capitalism led to financial liberalization, the erosion of social security, and the deregulation of the labor market.

Together, these events have had far-reaching impacts on young people, creating a system that has undermined their economic security. For example, the Education Maintenance Allowance, which allowed young people to apply for a means-tested allowance of £30 a week, has been cut, while other schemes like Universal Credit and Housing Benefit, which support youth transition out of difficult personal circumstances, now assist significantly fewer people. 

Qureshi says she learned to prioritize “survival over fun” growing up while her parents tried to make ends meet. These sacrifices continued during her college years—not least because they occurred during the pandemic. “We didn’t have teachers because there wasn’t enough funding,” she says. Instead, she resorted to self-teaching while substitute teachers rotated in and out of the classroom. “It just killed my passion for the vocation,” she says, “and now, I feel lost because I barely know the subject I studied.”

During this time, child poverty has also soared to its highest level since before World War II, with infant mortality rising for the first time in two generations and state spending per child falling from £11,300 to £10,000 between 2010 and 2020. Schools have experienced drastic cuts in investments, with more than 230 schools facing disruption in 2023 caused by the “crumbling concrete” crisis. Extracurricular services have taken a hit, and many children can no longer access art, music, and drama in the classroom. Libraries and youth clubs have shut down in impoverished areas. And a third of all school-aged children in poverty were not granted free school meals, due to stringent means-testing that restricts their access.   

Child poverty is acutely concentrated in the north and the Midlands. But these are not patterns that occurred by chance, says Elliot Johnson, a Senior Research Fellow in Public Policy at Northumbria University. “It's all the forms of support that children need that are being taken away from those areas where they are needed most,” he says.

As a result, children born in Britain after 2010 account for 3.4 million of the 4.3 million children in poverty, part of what former prime minister Gordon Brown has called “the austerity generation.” 

“Yet in almost every single year of the past decade, even as their need has been mounting, the government’s support for children has been spiraling downwards, each year more difficult than the year before as, with almost surgical precision,” Brown recently wrote in The Guardian. 

Policymakers in London are often “people who are not in poverty, which makes it much more difficult for those particular solutions to be effective,” explains Becky Bainbridge, the CEO of the Reclaim Project, a youth organization in Manchester that aims to equip young working-class people with leadership skills. 

Johnson’s research group, the Common Sense Policy Group, has advocated introducing a universal welfare system. It’s an ambitious goal, but Johnson says that “even a relatively modest payment to all citizens could reduce poverty, both for children and everyone else, to historically low levels.” He adds that policymakers should consider the effects of their policies on future generations: “We need to think about bigger reform and have a safety net that works for all.” 

“It's not an optimistic country to be in,” he contends, “but it’s possible to turn things around again.” 

Qureshi, who has been working with her local council to raise these issues, feels passionate about having people like her represented at the highest levels of government. “Everyone in power should at least go live with working-class people for a couple of weeks and see the struggle,” she says. “How are you planning on increasing university fees when you never have to pay for it? How are you making it [even] harder for people to get out of poverty?”

These questions become even more significant at a time when Labour leader Keir Starmer, who is widely expected to win the next election by a landslide, has advocated for lowering the voting age from 18 to 16. “If you can work, if you can pay tax, if you can serve in your armed forces, then you ought to be able to vote,” he told reporters during a campaign visit to Stafford earlier this month. 

Members of the Tory party have been critical of such proposals, while polling by a group called More in Common found that giving 16-year-olds the right to vote was unpopular with the public.

But it’s for this reason that Qureshi feels excited to cast her vote on July 4. Recently, she attended a program in Parliament called “Our Generation. Our Vote,” where she met contemporaries from across the country who were advocating for a 16-year-old voting age. 

“It just sparked hope in my heart knowing that young people were wanting their lives to be better and actively trying to do something about it,” she says.