Thank You, Alan Milburn

On Tuesday, the government publishes a review of the benefits system I live in. Alan Milburn has spent a year looking at people like me — the roughly one million 16-to-24-year-olds not in education, employment or training — and according to the briefings, his conclusion is that the system underneath us should be rebuilt "from scratch".

I am 21. I claim Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment. I have cerebral palsy, hydrocephalus and scoliosis. By the accounting this review uses, I am one of the million.

So thank you, Alan Milburn. I have read the plan. It is aimed at me.

What's actually on the table

Stripped of the language of opportunity, the proposal is this:

• People under 25 would no longer be able to claim the health element of Universal Credit, or Personal Independence Payment.
• The health element becomes a "youth allowance" paid at the standard rate of Universal Credit. That is not a rebrand. That is less money.
• PIP becomes an "additional cost allowance" to cover day-to-day costs relating to our conditions — and it is expected that fewer people would qualify for it than qualify for PIP now.
• There is a higher-rate benefit in there, but only for people whose disabilities mean they cannot work at all.
• And existing claimants would be moved too. Not just new ones. People already on these benefits would be lifted off them.

To his credit, Milburn has not pretended this is costless. In an interview with The Times, reported by The Independent, he said it would not be "pain-free", and that "some people will get less financial support at the beginning of their benefit claim than under the current system".

I have read that sentence several times now, and I keep snagging on the same word. Beginning.

The beginning of my benefit claim. My claim began, more or less, at the beginning of my life. I have had a shunt in my head since infancy. There is no beginning to a lifelong condition, and no end of one either. The claim is not a phase I am passing through on my way to a job. It is the floor I am standing on while I look for one.

The catch-22 with better branding

Here is the part I need you to look at closely.

The higher rate — the one piece of this plan with more money in it than the present system — is for people who cannot work at all. If you can work, you get the youth allowance and a job coach. If you can never work, you get the better benefit.

I can work. I want to work. I have been trying to work.

Let me say it at full volume, for anyone at the back who still has not understood: I want a fucking job. There aren't any. That is the entire problem, stated as plainly as I can state it.

And underneath that sits an arrangement that is ridiculous the moment you say it out loud: to be allowed to live, you have to be a cog in somebody's machine. Fine. It is a bad deal, but it is the deal, and I would take it. Except there are no machines. The cogs are here, machined and waiting. The machines are not hiring.

I have now applied for roughly 35 suitable software and IT jobs. I have received zero responses. Not rejections. Silence. I have written about this already, in What the Fuck Am I Supposed to Do With the Piece of Paper? and I Have Experience. It Just Isn't 'Professional'.. The wall is not my willingness. The wall is that "entry-level" now means a job for someone who has already started their career somewhere else, and disability reads as risk in a pile of fifty identical CVs.

Nor is any of this hypothetical. There are eighty public repositories on my GitHub, more than nine thousand commits this year alone, and I pushed to three of them this week. Among them: an AT Protocol SDK in C23 — wire-level, client-side, not a port of anybody's backend; a Bluesky client running on a Wii U and another on a Nintendo 3DS; a compiler for a symbolic stack language; a personal data server; a native teal.fm client for iOS and Android; a small machine-learning toolkit in Rust. C, C++, Rust, TypeScript, Kotlin, C#, Go, Nix. That is the "no professional experience" that the rejections are rejecting.

And — this is the part that should embarrass somebody — people already pay me for the work. Not employers. Strangers. Through Ko-fi and GitHub Sponsors, via Stripe, because a tool of mine rescued their Last.fm history, or scrobbles their music, or just because they wanted to chip in. The market has voted. Employers simply have not opened the ballots.

So the deal on the table is this: keep less money while applying to jobs that do not write back, or prove I can never work at all and get the higher rate. Try, and be poorer for trying. The system will pay me more to give up than to keep going, and it will call that an incentive to succeed.

That is not opportunity. It is a trap with a careers adviser in it.

The adviser who will stick with me

The plan also comes with support. A personal adviser who will "stick with them until they have found a job or an apprenticeship or a college place".

Read that list back to me. I have already done the college place — a Level 3 Diploma in Information Technology, finished this summer. An apprenticeship is an odd thing to offer someone who already holds the qualification the apprenticeship was supposed to lead to. Which leaves the job. The one item on the list that nobody in this plan is actually responsible for delivering.

I do not need another babysitter. I do not lack people sticking with me, either. I have a boyfriend who sticks with me. I had teachers who stuck with me, back when a spreadsheet was being used to explain my own work ethic back to me. What I lack is an employer who reads past the word "college" on my CV, and no adviser, however sticky, is going to fix that.

And then there is the bit about fast-tracking young people with mild ADHD, autism and anxiety off NHS waiting lists and into work quicker. I am not formally diagnosed autistic. I highly suspect it — the way you suspect the thing that explains the rest of you. I think in systems. I notice when one is misbehaving. There is four years of public work on my GitHub, and none of it was ever a hobby. Whether or not a clinician ever puts it on paper, it is not a bottleneck in my pipeline; it is the reason the pipeline exists. But sure. Mild. Off you pop into work, quick as you like.

The support being offered is support at me. None of it is aimed at the door. All of it is aimed at the queue.

The million

Nearly one in eight of us. A million young people not in education, employment or training. I am in the million the way you are in a waiting room: not by choice, and trying the door every so often to see whether it has been unlocked.

Here is my year, since the review's category is so fond of counting: in April I had my fourth brain surgery, the shunt having done what shunts eventually do — I wrote about that in Subcritical. I went back to college two weeks after it. In June I finished my Level 3 diploma. Since then I have been doing the one thing the system says I am not doing, which is trying.

The trying is invisible. Only the not-yet is counted. The spreadsheet will record that I am a NEET. The spreadsheet recorded that I was late, too.

What still stands

For completeness, and because I do not do inaccuracy: none of this is law yet. Tuesday is a report. Legislation is pencilled in for next year, it will be fought over, and my payments continue in the meantime. I will read the whole thing when it lands, because I read things — thoroughly, you might say — and if the criteria for this additional cost allowance are as narrow as the charities fear, you will be hearing from me again.

Scope has already done the arithmetic: around half of households with someone under 22 on the UC health element are already in poverty, and that could pass nine in ten if the payment is removed. That is the floor being discussed. Those are the people standing on it.

I should say where on that floor I live: at the bottom of it. Minimum-rate PIP, minimum-rate UC. I pay rent to my mum out of it, and it barely helps. I am not being paid too much to work. I am being paid too little to live. The proposal on the table is that this floor should be lowered, and the pitch is that I will thank them for it later.

And no, we are still not lazy

In September I wrote to the Prime Minister — indirectly, publicly, in Thank you, Prime Minister Andy Burnham — because a blog is the channel a 21-year-old gets. I said that we are not lazy, and that the job market is failing us. This post is the same correspondence, continued; he will not read this one either. Months later, the answer has arrived all the same, in the only form this government ever sends answers: lower the floor, and call it a ladder.

An allowance is not a safety net. A coach is not a job. And a review that asks everything of a million young people — and nothing whatsoever of the employers who will not hire us — is not a review of us. It is a review of our patience.

Chan eil mi leisg. I am not lazy. I am 21, I am disabled, I am trying, and on Tuesday my government will explain, in a well-bound document, exactly how much less it has decided that is worth.