Graduate jobs apocalypse: Opportunities tailor-made for university leavers crash to record low as Labour prices the young out of work

Labour has been accused of creating a ‘graduate jobs apocalypse’ after the number of opportunities tailor-made for university leavers collapsed to a record low. 

In a bleak report that fuelled fears that a ‘lost generation’ of youngsters face a lifetime on out-of-work benefits, jobs website Adzuna said the number of graduate roles has fallen 45 per cent in the past year.

The study said fewer than 10,000 jobs aimed at graduates were advertised last month – the first time it has fallen below this level since Adzuna started tracking the figures in 2016.

The report follows official figures last week showing youth unemployment has soared to an 11-year high of 16.1 per cent under Labour.

There are now 739,000 youngsters aged between 16 and 24 who want a job but cannot find one, according to the Office for National Statistics.

And overall unemployment is at a five-year high of 5.2 per cent having been 4.1 per cent when Labour came to power.

Adzuna said job opportunities have contracted ‘sharply’ since the middle of last year ‘reinforcing the difficult conditions facing jobseekers’ as businesses put hiring on hold and turn to automation and artificial intelligence (AI).

Firms have been battered by higher costs under Labour – from Rachel Reeves’ £25billion national insurance tax raid to inflation-busting increases in the minimum wage and new employment rules.

Shadow Chancellor Sir Mel Stride said: ‘Labour are engineering a graduate jobs apocalypse. By making it dramatically more expensive and riskier to employ young people, they are crushing opportunities at the very start of working life.

‘Their ruinous national insurance hikes hit younger workers hardest, while their employment rights bill stacked with new risks will inevitably put off firms from hiring graduates altogether.

‘Labour have decimated graduate prospects by making it far more expensive to employ younger people.

‘This is what happens when a government that does not understand business or economics gambles with the future of an entire generation.’

Labour grandee Alan Milburn warned huge numbers of youngsters are getting ‘trapped in a world of benefits’.

The former Cabinet minister, who is who is leading a government review in to so-called NEETs, youths not in education, employment or training, said: ‘There is almost a downward escalator for too many young people, they’ve got poor health, poor education.’ 

Reform UK shadow chancellor Robert Jenrick said: ‘Labour’s high-tax, high-regulation agenda has been disastrous for British businesses and young people are now paying the price.

‘Instead of creating the conditions for job growth, Labour has doubled down on policies that punish enterprise and deter companies from hiring.

‘Reform UK would slash red tape, cut business taxes and prioritise British industry to create high-skilled jobs for our graduates.’

Adzuna said the overall number of jobs advertised last month stood at just 694,940 – down 16 per cent on a year earlier and below 700,000 for the first time since the depths of the Covid-19 pandemic in January 2021.

There are now 2.4 jobseekers competing for every vacancy, with Adzuna warning of ‘the fiercest competition in years’.

Shazia Ejaz, director of campaigns at the Recruitment & Employment Confederation, said: ‘Government decisions have made it increasingly costly to give people a job at a time when unemployment figures are rising. 

‘If politicians want to avoid a labour market that accepts higher unemployment, they must stop advancing policies that push it up.’

A pledge by the Chancellor to equalise minimum wage rates between younger and older workers is being questioned amid warnings it is pricing people seeking a first job out of the market.

The minimum wage for those aged 18 to 20 went up from £8.60 an hour to £10 in April last year and is due to rise to £10.85 in April.

Peter Dixon, at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, has said younger workers ‘are being priced out of the market’.

Andy King, a former executive at the Office for Budget Responsibility, has called the crisis ‘self-inflicted’.

Unemployment among 16 to 24-year-olds is now at the highest level since late 2014 and above the average level in the European Union for the first time this century.