Labour’s summer jobs scheme is great, but lacks scale and ambition

I started work, aged 14, paid £3 an hour in today’s money, for Saturday mornings in a shop. At 16, I worked a full day, as did most of my friends. We also worked every summer. This was normal in the 1980s.

My family was poor, so working allowed me to save for the things I wanted. That is a good lesson for life. It taught me different forms of self-discipline and better social skills. Those are also good lessons.

Both Saturday work and summer jobs are dying out. June 2025 saw the fewest postings in the UK for that month in seven years, according to data from hiring platform Indeed. Summer jobs are no longer a right of passage, the way to pay for driving lessons.

Things are different in the US, where 90% of the top 30 cities run a summer jobs programme, targeting young people aged 14-24. Despite America supposedly being the most capitalist place on earth, City Hall pays the wages. These programmes are not new – New York’s started in 1963. Even with 100,000 places a year, and paying just £6 an hour, the city’s programme has two applicants for each place.

New York runs the scheme as a lottery. This is a dream for social scientists: comparing winners with losers tells us if summer jobs matter. Wharton School professor Judd B Kessler, working with co-authors, found that getting a summer job reduced arrest rates that summer by 17%, largely among men. Big reductions in violent crime have also been found in Chicago and Boston.

Crime is partly a habit: if you commit crime one summer, you are more likely to do so the next. The reductions in crime found in New York were mainly among people who had previously been arrested. Having a summer job broke the cycle of crime and it remained broken for the majority: arrest rates fell by 10% over the next five years.

The UK is, thankfully, following in America’s footsteps. Paid for by the Youth Endowment Fund, and run by UK Youth and the Ending Youth Violence Lab, the UK had a summer programme for 400 young people last year, and 500 this year. But we need to ask about the scale of our ambition. NYC will support 100,000, the UK 500. I mean, really?

We have a good history of subsidising jobs. Gordon Brown had the future jobs fund, and Rishi Sunak had Kickstart. Evaluations look at employment rather than crime, but show that both chancellors were on to something: about one in 10 additional people got a proper job by being on the schemes.

This autumn, Rachel Reeves presents her budget. The chancellor is skint, but a summer jobs programme is not that expensive, and would hit three of Labour’s five election promises. It would kickstart economic growth by getting people into work, at a time when employers are hesitant to pay more tax on their payroll. It would reduce violent crime. And it would break down barriers to opportunity, since the people who use these schemes are disproportionately from communities and families who would otherwise be left behind.

To govern is to choose: since incumbent spending programmes always have support, someone has to stand up for new ideas – especially when they have a track record of success elsewhere.

Tim Leunig is chief economist at Nesta, the social innovation agency

Photograph: Getty