Rapper Professor Green shines the light on White Working Class Men and the skills gap

Another day, another skills crisis and yet another warning of doom. This time the warning comes from the British Chamber of Commerce which claims that unless the country’s labour and skills shortage are addressed, our sceptre’d isle will disappear into the Atlantic.

Well, not quite as bad as that. But nearly. The BCC, the trade organisation representing thousands of private companies, says the shortage of workers across all industries is now so acute that we are heading for a downturn in economic activity.

All the country’s big business lobbying bodies -the CBI, the EEF and the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors – say the same: and have been moaning about the problem for decades.

And they are right. Even though employment is at an all time high – or depending how you look at it – unemployment is at an all time low, the UK still has a critical shortage of skilled people in some of the most vital industries.

More than two thirds of all manufacturers and service companies say they can’t fill a third of the jobs they have on offer. The shortage is not just at the high-end technical staff such as design and development engineers either.  There are also not enough people with foreign language skills needed to market and sell the products being made.

Industry also needs more manual, semi-skilled labour: bricklayers, more drivers, more electricians. As the new Army adverts show, there is also a chronic shortage of youngsters wanting to go into the services.

And for once, Brexit cannot be blamed. This is a crisis of Britain’s own making, and a crisis that is due to a massive failure of successive Labour and Conservative governments, policy-makers, educators at schools and colleges, careers advisors, the business community itself and, indeed, parents.

What’s more tragic is that parallel to this shortage of skills, we have a generation of young working class white men (and indeed women) growing up who are now out of work and on the dole. Or flat out on the streets smoking Spice, holed up in hostels for the homeless or involved in petty crime.

In the jargon, these young men and women go by the name of NEETs: those who are Not in Education, Employment or Training. There are nearly 790,000 people aged 16-24 who are classified as Neets – that’s 11.1% of all people in this age group.

About a third of these NEETs – the description should be banned and changed to the lost tribe –  are unemployed. The rest are what’s called economically inactive, either because they don’t want to work, or are not able to because of disabilities or illness.

Roughly, that means there are 250,000 young men in the UK – mainly from poorer backgrounds – who could be working but are not. This fits in with the latest figures which show that while 40% of all young people go on to higher education, only 10% of white disadvantaged young men do so.

Yet with the right support network, training and support from their families – if they have them – school teachers and business men and women, most of them would probably break their backs to be given the chance to find decent work.

But they don’t get the chance, and that’s tragic. If you have any doubts about the tragedy of a lost generation of youngsters, you should watch Professor Green’s stunning two-part TV documentary, White Working Class Men, which was aired earlier this week on Channel 4. In the first part, the rapper Green, who was brought up by his grandmother on a Hackney council estate, gives us a peak into the lives of David, Lewis and Denzil to look at how they cope with the challenges of coming from tough backgrounds such as his own.

This was television at its most brilliant; showing rather than telling. I’m not going to give away their stories – you need to see the programme – but it was a shocking reminder to what an extent young working class boys have been, and are still, being edged out to the fringes of British society. More frightening is that Green said he had become more depressed by the end of his six months of touring some of the harshest areas of the country to film the documentary, than before starting it. What’s more, he fears that many of these youngster are becoming more rather than less disengaged .

And that is the tragedy, a bizarre one too. For over the last few years there have been numerous attempts to draw in those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. There have been endless government initiatives, endless training programmes and attempts by colleges and universities to get more working class boys to stay at school to A level, let alone go on further.

Yet, as Green points out, “ From the areas I went to for the documentary, there seems to be a real lack of drive and belief in them being able to achieve anything, and there’s an acceptance of that.

“For middle-class families, your education is your life. For working-class families, in some instances school is just school. You are not expected to do very well. You are expected to get out and do a job and earn. People have to be encouraged from early on to engage with education and think it’s for them.”

Part of the problem for young men – and women – today is the decline in apprenticeships available for those who want to leave school early and do more vocational work. The numbers peaked in the mid-1960s, when about a third of all boys left school to take on apprenticeships. Since then, the numbers have been in freefall, dropping by half between 1979 and 1995.

Government has been hopeless at getting the numbers up, despite endless chatter. Not surprisingly, the attempt by George Osborne, the previous Chancellor, to help plug the skills gap with a new apprenticeship levy has proved a flop.

Osborne’s levy was always going to be a complex – and expensive – answer to what should have been a straight forward solution so its no surprise that half of all employers want it scrapped. Another government attempt to create a new layer of prestigious technical qualifications, T-levels, has been delayed for two years. Typical.

So who is going to get to grips with the skills gap, and help get the Neets into work as well? Businessmen and women – together with head teachers – are the only ones who can make these changes: forget government for now although the new education secretary, Damian Hinds, shows some promise. They should start by watching Professor Green’s TV programme – the second part is next week – and I defy them not to sob, at least once.