In today's bleakly depressing news, a 20-year-old boy killed himself after he couldn't find a job. Too proud to receive benefits, Martin Hadfield, from Tottington, Greater Manchester, was found hung in his flat just 24 hours after going to the Jobcentre.
Martin had applied for 40 jobs in the space of 12 weeks after losing his job as a landscape gardener. He had NVQ qualifications and GCSEs, but apparently some of his job applications didn't even receive a response.
His family have explained that he was very keen to work. His stepfather, Peter O'Gorman, told The Mirror, 'Martin was obviously never a statistic to us but, in the last months of his life, he became a statistic to other people. He was a statistic by being out of work, a statistic when he went into the Jobcentre and now he is a statistic by killing himself.'
He's right, in a way. UK youth unemployment is hovering around the one million mark, and a larger proportion of 16 to 24 year olds are now out of work than any other age group – a sign that young people have, so far, bourne the brunt of the recession. Three quarters of those people out of work admit feeling like they have no sense of purpose.
And far from the popular myth that young people aren't working because they're lazy and would rather be watching Jeremy Kyle all day long, there are structural problems at play. Last week Labour's ex-culture secretary Tessa Jowell called for there to be a 'skills guarantee' scheme for school leavers to ensure they were equipped with the tools they needed to get into the workplace. 'This is where there’s a real opportunity for a skills guarantee that will ensure no young person leaves education without the necessary skills, not only to secure work but to progress,' she said at the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion’s Youth Employment Convention, insisting this would help the 17 per cent of London businesses who admit they are lacking employees who have skills such as coding.
For Martin, though, it would all come too late. His stepfather insisted that when it came to work, he was happy to do whatever to get by, saying, 'He wasn’t fussy. He would have taken anything just to be working. But I have heard from so many people that the Jobcentre experience is very demoralising. The human touch is so much better than looking at a name on a piece of paper. The bureaucracy is ridiculous.'
Recording a verdict of suicide at the inquest at Heywood coroner's office, coroner Simon Nelson said, 'Martin was clearly very highly thought of and these are fine attributes indeed. It may well be a moment of madness, but I feel sure that he intended the consequences of his actions.'
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Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.