Ten initiatives to help young people: 4. Personal service jobs tax deductible

Let down by the inadequacies of our education system, some young people leave school without any meaningful qualifications, and find it hard to obtain unemployment.  Meanwhile, many successful men and women in work find it difficult to balance the needs of a working life with domestic chores such as looking after children, keeping gardens tidy, and doing odd jobs around the house.  The domestic commitments make them less focused and less productive. The two could be matched, given appropriate incentives.  Young people with scant qualifications could work as nannies, au pairs, handymen, gardeners and, if they were put through their driving test, as chauffeurs.  Taking into account minimum wage and National Insurance, however, the cost of employing people in personal service would be beyond the means of many working people.

Given people to help with personal services, successful men and women could have more of their time to do work, and raise their productivity and their contribution to the nation's economy.  Government could facilitate this by making it a tax-deductible business expense for people to employ young people under the age of 25 in personal services such as those listed above.

The gains would be immense to both sides.  Freed from the hassle of domestic chores, the business people would gain time to concentrate more on their work.  The young people would gain employment, and would acquire skills and experience to render them more employable in the future.  They would have the habits, experience and discipline of work, and would enhance their CVs with good references.  Furthermore, they would have the examples of successful businessmen and women as role models, encouraging them to raise their own sights.  

There would be on-the-job training, with their employers coaching them in the requirements for acting as chauffeurs, gardeners, handymen, nannies, household assistants and the like.  It could be a requirement for tax deductibility that the employers would agree to train their employees in this manner.

There would, of course, be a tax cost to the Treasury if such employment were made tax-deductible.  But it would be offset by huge gains in employment, with fewer young people out of work, and fewer of them entering adult life without marketable skills.  Fewer of them would be dependent on state support in future.  The gains resulting from this would outweigh the costs.