Michelle Le Clerc: Our youth – a call to arms

Heidi and I were going to cover intergenerational fairness as a topic in our last podcast, however events, dear reader, events took over and as many of you will know we covered the recent update on the £42m. wasted on the MyGov and Revenue Services IT issues.

I was asked recently to go into the Sixth Form Centre to speak on any political topic. Firstly, I must say that I was not in favour of the move from Les Varendes site to La Mare de Carteret, however I was impressed with the work that has been done to transform the old La Mare High School into the temporary Sixth Form Centre. It’s not quite a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but it looks and feels like the staff and students have made the best of what they were given.

The students have been involved in decorating communal areas and the classrooms were full of students studying diligently on my visit. So much so that the attendance for my talk was very low. I was told it clashed with study time for forthcoming exams, but perhaps an ex-politician does not have the same ‘pull’ as I once did? Are they not listening to our podcasts?

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I chose to speak about the poor turnout of young people for the last 2025 island-wide States election and ask them if they registered to vote, if they voted and if not, why not. A report by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, Observation Mission noted that youth participation remained limited and young people were largely absent from the electoral process both as voters and candidates. Visibility and turnout among young voters remained modest (30% of islanders under 35 registered to vote).

Overall, the report highlighted a persistent gap in youth political engagement and representation. I reminded the audience that we are very fortunate in Guernsey as our voting age is 16, unlike many other jurisdictions. I pointed out some of the major issues that they as a generation are going to face and why political engagement should be important to them. I am pleased to see that the States & Assembly Constitution Committee is hoping to bring a debate to the States in the new year exploring ways in which younger voters can be encouraged to vote in 2029.

Some of these topics I have covered in my previous articles such as the ageing demographic. The number of those in retirement and coming up to retirement will increase significantly over the next few years.

We also know that we will see increasing costs of health care, social care, housing and welfare benefits as the number of people in work and paying taxes will decline. This is the reason why we can no longer delay decisions on our future tax system. I do hope our current crop of politicians will really face up to the stark reality when the debate on taxation comes back to the States in 2026. I also really hope that our young people will be engaged in that debate as the decisions made in 2026 will affect the lives of the young much more than those who currently have the loudest voice, our retirees. This intergenerational unfairness or inequality is just one of the reasons that young people need to be politically engaged.

Keiran James, the principal at the Sixth Form Centre, pointed me in the direction of a podcast, Radical, from the journalist Amol Rajan, Radio 4 and University Challenge presenter. He talked with the writer Dr Eliza Filby about her book on the Intergenerational divide, ‘Inheritocracy’, about the bank of mum and dad.

She felt that we are currently living in an inheritocracy, where those on inherited wealth or family financial support have a much better chance in life than in previous generations where meritocracy meant that if you worked hard at school, and through your ability and achievements you gained your financial security, wealth, lifestyle and ability to buy a house.

She believes that if you are under 45, your life chances and opportunities are significantly and increasingly determined by your access to the bank of mum and dad.

Although her book and the podcast covered the position in the UK much of what is discussed is transferable to our current situation in Guernsey – unaffordable house prices, high rents, university costs prohibiting some students going on to higher education, although Filby believes the value of a degree is declining, not just financially but also it appears to no longer being a given path to success or a job.

The current UK unemployment rate for 16 to 24-year-olds is 16%, according to the Office for National Statistics. The UK is also seeing an increase in economic inactivity for the same age group with one of the reasons being long-term illness, a worrying trend. One of the failures of the IT infrastructure within Guernsey Revenue Services is the lack of data being produced by the Data and Analysis Service with several key reports not being available. However, we know that long-term illness across all age groups is a concern for Guernsey, particularly the increase in mental health related illness.

Rajan’s podcast very much covers the various generations. If, like me, you are unsure where you belong, baby boomers are those born between 1946-64, Gen X between 1965-1979, millennials between 1980-1994, Gen Z between 1995-2014 and Gen Alpha between 2015-2030. I am in the baby boomers generation and according to Filby, we are the ones that have benefited the most over the past years. The average age of a UK first-time buyer in 1960 was 23, it is now 33/34. In 2000, 59% of 25 to 34-year-olds owned their homes, it has now dropped to around 39%.

Guernsey is most likely in a similar position or worse. As young people wait longer to afford to buy or even rent a property, birthrate also falls and will continue to do so, increasing the dependency ratio.

Without financial help from parents or grandparents there is often very little chance of most young Guernsey people getting on the housing ladder. They are also helping out with university costs (in the UK graduates are often leaving with student loans of around £60,000). Here in Guernsey it is often parents shouldering these costs. While this helps individual families, it often only widens the wealth inequality since it is only those with families able to offer financial assistance who can get ahead.

There is also the amount of unpaid childcare that the boomer and Gen X generations provide. They are currently the ones able to retire early, many of them with a guaranteed final salary scheme.

With longer working lives, due to the pension age in Guernsey gradually increasing to 70, future generations will not be able to rely on the help of parents and grandparents for childcare. Perhaps even more worrying for all of us is that the boomers are hitting their ‘care years’. We are now the ones requiring help, we are living longer and managing illness for longer. This demographic time bomb is now upon us, at a time when there is a squeeze on public finances.

We have seen in the past week or so the public concerns created by the Health & Social Care president announcing that the committee is potentially looking at charging for operations and hospital stays. This, I am sure, will be a future The Long and Short of It podcast topic.

So why is it important that our young people are fully engaged in the political process? It is because they really do need to understand that they will not necessarily have the benefits that their parents and grandparents received. They are much less likely to have the financial support that previous generations received. Family wealth and potential inheritance will most likely need to be spent by those parents on their own health and care costs, as government struggles to fund such services.

Parents and grandparents’ working lives will be much longer, therefore less childcare support will be available from family. The young already struggle to afford their own homes, and the financial burden in the form of increased taxes and social insurance will also fall on them.

Guernsey’s structural fiscal deficit and increasing dependency ratio are making inter-generational unfairness the biggest political issue of them all. Yet it receives very little airtime. Do young people trust their elders to solve it for them? They do need to wake up and fight for their rights themselves.