Voices blog

On Thursday, 31 March, Paying For It, a program run by the Citizenship Foundation in partnership with Aviva, held their Youth Budget 2011 event at the Treasury.

Paying For It runs the Chance to be a Chancellor competition, which is an interactive online challenge that encourages young people between the ages of 14 and 18 to create their own budgets. From the online challenge, participants submit their budgets to be entered to become Youth Chancellor. I attended the event where the runners-up were honoured, and this year’s Youth Chancellor, Priyesh Patel, presented the 2011 Youth Budget to Sir Nicolas Macpherson - Permanent Secretary to the Treasury. After, there was a panel discussion about the economy with questions from the young people in the audience.

The event was really stimulating and it was great to hear how well informed these young people are about the economy. I was able to speak to some of them during the reception following the event and I was impressed with their passion and what they had learned. The young people that I talked to all participated in the competition independently, ie not through their school. Joel, from Gaynes School in year 9, said that he learned, ‘You can’t please everyone, everyone has their own opinions…I gained knowledge on how hard it is to run a country and what amounts of money are going into different things.’ I believe he summed up the main issues the country faces with cutting the deficit and creating a budget.

The other young people I spoke to were interested in studying subjects like economics, finance, law, and maths. I talked to a lot of them about what they focused on in their budgets and there was a consensus that education and healthcare should be a priority in spending. However, they also had varying opinions on other things that should be cut and why. For example, Daniel from Gaynes School in year 9 said, ‘I lowered the spending for Defence, because I feel that due to our connections and the country we are, we will be protected from outside threats…we do have the UN and NATO, who act as global police, so I think there is no real need for a large part of the budget to go to Defence.’

Whatever our view of the result, both in the build-up to this month’s Budget and in the initial reactions, it seems to me that two themes (expressed pretty unanimously across both the centre-left and the centre-right) are dominant.

Frst, that public spending will need to be reigned in at some point in the not too distant future - even if this might not be the time for slash and burn and even if some of the immediate or eventual consequences are dire.

Second, that while there are various arguments for altering the distribution of the tax burden across socio-economic groups - as the furore over Darling’s 50p call on top-end earners confirms - increasing the net tax-take significantly beyond current levels is a risky political and economic option.

For me, though, there is a broader point: how do we manage our own ever-raising aspirations about what public services can reasonably deliver - when reducing public spending is an economic imperative and when further raising taxes is politically risky - even in areas where the broad cross-party consensus is that the state should invest on our behalf: in health, in education, in maintaining a viable and sustainable transport infrastructure, in child protection, in policing and so on - especially when these aspirations come, in large part, not from an engaged, participative citizenry but from an apparently politically disengaged mass of complainant consumers? “I want it all. I want it now!”

This was a question that I raised from the floor at a pre-Budget breakfast seminar just before the budget, staged by the emergent and increasingly name-checked centre-right think tank Reform at the UK headquarters of PA Consulting in Victoria. Vince Cable was the star speaker, alongside Reform Director Andrew Haldenby and Colm Reilly who heads-up the Government Practice at PA.

For me, Reilly had it right when he spoke about Budgets not just being financial instruments concerned with economic decision-making but statements of policy and priority with strong human, social and ethical dimensions and consequences.

Perhaps in this kind of analysis - the kind of ‘citizen-economics’ that we have been trying to get our heads around at the Citizenship Foundation - we might begin to understand that while we can’t have it all “right here, right now”, we might be able to begin to build a different kind of society, based on a different type of economics: just a little bit greener, engaged and sustainable; just a little bit less wasteful, costly and materialistic; more “get something, give something back” than “buy one, get one free”; shopping when we need to do so, not “until we drop”; as much about shared responsibilities as individual rights.

I could buy into this change of emphasis - even if higher taxes are a part of the deal - and I suspect others, across the political spectrum, could do so too.

Having survived my trial by early-morning TV this week, I thought it would be interesting to take a moment to reflect on the experience, and on the survey I was there to talk about.

The headline findings of this survey (commissioned to support our new guide to money for young people My Money, My Rights) showed that students are concerned about the costs and benefits of Higher Education, that 70% of young people would like to learn more about money management at school, and that 4 out of 5 teenagers are worried about the impact of the recession when they leave full time education. Since talking about these findings I’ve witnessed first hand how the same statistics can be picked up and marshalled to support a wide number of causes. For example, one statistic has been presented as proof of the need to introduce financial education as a new statutory subject, another as a damning indictment of tuition fees in University.

So, what do I think these statistics show? Firstly, I think they show young people taking a really responsible attitude to their futures; they are crying out to learn more about money in order to make informed choices about their lives - shouldn’t we be recognising and responding to this? Secondly, that young people are concerned about the current economic crisis (2/3 of young people in our survey told us they worry about money), so we should be making sure that they are engaged in discussions about rebuilding our economic system in the future - after all, they are the ones who will live with the consequences of our decisions.