Steph McGovern

But that's not a new thing, Alan, is it?

You're not going to be telling the education secretary or whoever else in government anything new.

And that's my worry is it hasn't changed and this is really dangerous.

Everyone's got skills.

Everyone's got skills.

But isn't that partly the government's fault because it has become so expensive to employ young people?

So I have a retail business.

We employ nearly 100 people.

A lot of them are 16 to 24 year olds.

Then they are the first time jobbers and they are, you know, some of them are from pretty tough backgrounds and they're often the best ones running the business.

Our most profitable store is run by a 16 year old.

Right.

Yeah, she's brilliant.

But it's become a lot more expensive to employ them.

We've seen, and I understand why minimum wage needs to go up, but it's come at all together at once.

You've got the, particularly for the youngest of the young people, it's gone up like 26% over the last year or so and last couple of years to employ them purely on their wages.

Then with national insurance contributions on top, then with business rates going up as well,

It's actually really tough for employers to employ young people.

And so there is a government problem here with making the industries which provide those jobs just too expensive, particularly, as you say, hospitality, leisure, retail.

They're the ones hardest hit by all of these essentially tax changes.