Letter: Answer to youth unemployment problem
Youth unemployment will continue to rise year on year unless we rebuild consumer confidence and get people back on to our high streets.
Youth unemployment will continue to rise year on year unless we rebuild consumer confidence and get people back on to our high streets.
We need to raise wages to rebuild confidence and cut taxes for the small employers who employ the majority of the UK workforce. We need to reduce business rate tax to zero for all firms making below £100,000 annual turnover.
Scrapping the employer's national insurance for firms with profits below £875,000 would free up resources for creating jobs and expanding the business. Corporation tax on small companies needs to be cut from 18 per cent to five per cent for all company profits below £5m, with the first £875,000 of profit tax-exempt.
Youth unemployment is one million strong and will need to be cut, so we must invest in the right apprenticeships for our young people. We have seen the retail sector, which employs a large proportion of young people, suffer and that is why we need to combine tax reform with increasing the minimum wage to stimulate job creation and growth.
Our young people have knowledge and ideas and we need to ask them how we tackle the economic problems. Manufacturing and construction need to be more lightly taxed to get manpower-intensive industries to create jobs and expand.
To fund the reforms we need to impose a tax on banker bonuses, windfall profits tax on energy monopolies and oil and tobacco giants. Reverse the one per cent tax cut given to the multinational corporations and switch off the £7 billion subsidy to airlines in excise duty-free aviation fuel.
We will see more companies going bust and more jobs lost unless the Government and the opposition start listening to the comprehensive English National Wage Campaign Pay and Tax Reform Plan.
Oliver Healey
Hadley