Youth minimum wage hikes are costing people jobs, Kemi Badenoch warns
By Saghir Hussain ·
Kemi Badenoch is right — and everyone in Westminster knows it, even the ones pretending otherwise.
Labour's pledge to equalise the minimum wage for 18-to-20-year-olds with the National Living Wage sounds fair on a conference stage. In a corner shop in Stoke or a café in Swansea, it looks like a redundancy notice.
The sums don't lie — and neither do the empty shifts
I've spoken to enough small business owners this year to know the pattern. A 35% jump in the youth rate since 2021 hasn't just "priced in" — it's priced out. The hairdresser in Mansfield who cut Saturday staff from three to two. The bakery in Bolton that stopped taking on apprentices because the numbers stopped stacking. These aren't multinational corporations offshoring profits. They're people who put their house on the line for a lease and a till.
When the wage floor rises faster than productivity, something gives. Usually it's hours. Sometimes it's the job entirely. The Resolution Foundation's own work shows youth employment lagging behind older age groups since the pandemic — and the gap widened as the youth rate accelerated. Coincidence? Pull the other one.
Young workers need a ladder, not a ledge
The argument goes: "But they're adults, they deserve adult pay." They also deserve a foot in the door. An 18-year-old with no experience, no references, and a wage bill identical to a 25-year-old who's been showing up on time for three years — that's not a hiring prospect. That's a risk most small firms can't take.
We've created a perverse incentive: stay in education longer, or don't bother applying. The very people this policy claims to help — the ones without degrees, without connections, without a safety net — are the ones shut out first. I've seen it in my own hiring. When the cost of a trial shift hits £150 before you've seen a CV, you stop offering trial shifts.
Politics over pay packets
Badenoch's intervention is convenient opposition politics, yes. But convenience doesn't make it wrong. Labour's manifesto commitment was written by people who've never made a payroll. The Low Pay Commission warned of "employment effects" — Whitehall speak for "kids lose shifts" — and ministers pressed ahead anyway.
Now we get the Budget. Will Reeves freeze the youth rate? Index it to median earnings? Or double down and watch the entry-level market shrink further? Small businesses don't need grand narratives. They need predictability. They need to know that hiring a 19-year-old won't cost the same as a seasoned manager by 2027.
The minimum wage was never meant to be a career salary. It's a floor — not a ceiling, and certainly not a blockade. If we price the first rung too high, we shouldn't be surprised when nobody climbs.
So here's the question nobody in power wants to answer: would you rather a young person earn £8.60 an hour and learn a trade, or £11.44 an hour on the dole because the job never existed?