High Peak Liberal DemocratsAgainst the backdrop of this month's jubilant A-level and GCSE results, 17-year-old Sanjeev Singh provides a different picture of what it is to be young in Conservative Britain.
In many ways, Sanjeev is a young person "doing the right thing". He lives at home with his mum and three siblings and, since leaving school a year ago, he has persisted in looking for work. But Sanjeev, 17, is deaf and once prospective employers know he has a disability, they don't contact him again. He keeps trying to get interviews but, unable to travel safely alone on public transport, he has no way of getting to them.
This is where the welfare state's safety net is meant to kick in. Disability living allowance (DLA), for example - a benefit Sanjeev has received since he was six years old - could pay for a taxi on the days he needs get to an interview and has no one to help him communicate with the crowds on a bus. But the government chose to replace DLA with personal independence payment (PIP) and after being tested for the new, tougher assessment in December, Sanjeev had his benefits stopped, after more than a decade
Even unemployment benefit is out of his reach. There is no specific entitlement for jobseeker's allowance for anyone under 18, according to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Instead, it is left to local jobcentres to arbitrarily judge if someone is in "hardship". Neither is Sanjeev eligible for the disability "unfit for work" benefit, employment and support allowance (ESA). As a DWP spokesperson confirmed to me this week, that benefit is only available to under-18s if they have not only left school but also are living "independently". So a teenager coping with chronic illness or disability is expected to move out of their family home before the government will consider them for unemployment support.
Perversely, as a young disabled jobseeker, Sanjeev has no way of knowing if he is even classed as "fit for work". He cannot be assessed for ESA until he is 18 but in the meantime, must spend another year trying to find a job no employer so far wants to give him.
This is unwinnable Britain. Where you can be old enough to have left school but be classed as too young for out-of-work benefits. Where you can have a disability that stops you getting to a job interview but are not disabled enough to receive living allowance.
What is happening to Sanjeev sits within a wider landscape of the state's abandonment of young people: housing benefit cuts for under-21s, unemployed 18- to 21-year-olds to be sent on training "bootcamps", and the maintenance grants for students from poor backgrounds abolished. Each policy is based on the same assumption that every parent can afford to feed, clothe and house their children into adulthood.
Latest government plans to remove 18- to 22-year-olds' in-work benefits - that's tax credits to child benefit - will only hit disabled young people and young parents (any other under 25-year-old is not eligible). As Sam Royston, policy director at the Children's Society, put it to me: remove help such as tax credits, and young disabled people who are moving into adulthood and needing additional support will find it much harder to get into work and to live independently. It points to how far fears of so-called "welfare dependency" are detached from reality. The benefit system is not a crutch of dependency but - for anyone born outside of the security of money - often the launchpad to independence. To stamp out young people's housing, wages, education, unemployment, and disability support is to lock a whole generation - bar the wealthy - into stagnated opportunity, low incomes, and insecure work.
Sanjeev tells me he's going to keep looking for work while starting the appeal process to try and get his disability benefit back. He asks if I know how to fill out the forms. "I'm not getting any help," he explains. "I'll need to tell my mum to ring them."
Disabled teenagers are easily lost in a welfare state cut to the bone. To be young while poor or disabled is increasingly to watch your life chances be pulled away.
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We must help the disabled people facing imprisonment at home