Young people ‘facing bleaker future under coalition govt’

Guardian News and Media/LondonChildren and young people in the UK are facing a bleaker future under the coalition government than they did under Labour, according to children’s charity Unicef.In what amounts to a direct challenge to the government’s austerity agenda and widespread tightening of access to benefits, Unicef ranks the UK 16th out of 29 developed countries for overall wellbeing – and warns that teenagers’ prospects trail behind their counterparts in many European countries, including Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Portugal. Continuing high rates of teenage pregnancy, relatively low levels of young people in education, employment or training and problems of alcohol abuse in young teens push the UK down the international league table.Unicef said the situation facing young people in Britain is “expected to worsen” as a result of government policies, and it warns that “since 2010 the downgrading of youth policy and cuts to local government services are having a profound negative effect on young people”. Unicef says although the picture for British children may appear better than when the charity last compiled a league table – which put it at the bottom of a 21-country list in 2007 – their prospects are worsening once more as the cuts threaten to “sideline” a generation. The country is placed 29th on further education – bottom of the list of developed nations in Unicef’s report – 27th on teenage pregnancy, and on youth unemployment it is ranked 24th.The charity’s report cites more than £300mn – or 26% cuts – in budgets for young people’s services in England in 2011-12 and other warnings that 400,000 more children will be in child poverty in 2015-16 from the Family and Parenting Institute and Institute for Fiscal Studies.Anita Tiessen, the deputy executive director of Unicef UK, said: “There is no doubt that the situation for children and young people has deteriorated in the last three years with the government making policy choices that risk setting back children in their most serious stages of development …. “The government needs to acknowledge this and act now. While children and young people will be the first to bear the brunt if we fail to safeguard their wellbeing, over time society will pay the price.”The report draws on statistics from 2010 and shows a general improvement in children’s experiences over the first decade of this century, compared with the previous scorecard from 2007, which looked at data from 2001-02.But Unicef says further education participation rates in the UK are falling below 75%, compared with 80% in other developed countries.The country is in the bottom third of the table for infant mortality, with a rate of 4.4 per 1,000 live births, double the rate of Sweden or Finland and below Estonia and Slovenia.Furthermore, the report says that about 20% of 11-15-year-olds in the UK report having been drunk at least twice, and there is a teenage pregnancy rate of more than 30 per 1,000. The Unicef report, which suggests Labour policies in the first decade of the century had paved the way for improvements which are now under threat, follows international charity Save The Children’s first domestic fundraising appeal last autumn to help families hit by the cuts and recession.