Children's charity says situation facing young people in UK is expected to worsen as cuts threaten to 'sideline' a generation
Children and young people in the UK are facing a bleaker future under the coalition government than they did under Labour, according to children's charity Unicef.
In what amounts to a direct challenge to the government's austerity agenda and widespread tightening of access to benefits, Unicef ranks the UK 16th out of 29 developed countries for overall wellbeing – and warns that teenagers' prospects trail behind their counterparts in many European countries, including Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Portugal.
Continuing high rates of teenage pregnancy, relatively low levels of young people in education, employment or training and problems of alcohol abuse in young teens push the UK down the international league table.
Unicef said the situation facing young people in Britain is "expected to worsen" as a result of government policies, and it warns that "since 2010 the downgrading of youth policy and cuts to local government services are having a profound negative effect on young people".
Unicef says although the picture for British children may appear better than when the charity last compiled a league table – which put it at the bottom of a 21-country list in 2007 – their prospects are worsening once more as the cuts threaten to "sideline" a generation.
The country is placed 29th on further education – bottom of the list of developed nations in Unicef's report – 27th on teenage pregnancy, and on youth unemployment it is ranked 24th.
The charity's report cites more than £300m – or 26% cuts – in budgets for young people's services in England in 2011-12 and other warnings that 400,000 more children will be in child poverty in 2015-16 from the Family and Parenting Institute and Institute for Fiscal Studies.
Anita Tiessen, the deputy executive director of Unicef UK, said: "There is no doubt that the situation for children and young people has deteriorated in the last three years with the government making policy choices that risk setting back children in their most serious stages of development ….
"The government needs to acknowledge this and act now. While children and young people will be the first to bear the brunt if we fail to safeguard their wellbeing, over time society will pay the price."
The report draws on statistics from 2010 and shows a general improvement in children's experiences over the first decade of this century, compared with the previous scorecard from 2007, which looked at data from 2001/2.
But Unicef says further education participation rates in the UK are falling below 75%, compared with 80% in other developed countries.
The country is in the bottom third of the table for infant mortality, with a rate of 4.4 per 1000 live births, double the rate of Sweden or Finland and below Estonia and Slovenia. Furthermore, the report says that about 20% of 11-15-year-olds in the UK report having been drunk at least twice, and there is a teenage pregnancy rate of more than 30 per 1000.
The Unicef report, which suggests Labour policies in the first decade of the century had paved the way for improvements which are now under threat, follows international charity Save The Children's first domestic fundraising appeal last autumn to help families hit by the cuts and recession.
The overall table was topped by the Netherlands, the only country ranked among the top five countries in all dimensions of child wellbeing.
The first covers both relative poverty and the proportion of children being deprived of access to materials such as three meals a day, books suitable for their age and development, bikes or roller skates, indoor games, appropriate clothing or an internet connection. Others are health and safety, educational wellbeing, proper housing and environment, and a "behaviours and risks" category covering factors such as teenage fertility, smoking, alcohol and cannabis use, fighting, bullying, being overweight or lacking exercise and daily breakfast and fruit.
Following the Netherlands on the overall league table are Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, while at the opposite end, from the bottom, are Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, the US and Greece. Unicef says there does not appear to be a strong relationship with countries' per-capita GDP and there are signs that the countries of central and eastern Europe are being to close the gap on more established industrial economies.
Its report says: "As a moral imperative, the need to promote the wellbeing of children is widely accepted. As a pragmatic imperative, it is equally deserving of priority; failure to protect and promote the wellbeing of children is associated with increased risk across a wide range of later-life outcomes.
The report says that these outcomes range from "impaired cognitive development to lower levels of school achievement, from reduced skills and expectations to lower productivity and earnings, from higher rates of unemployment to increased dependence on welfare, from the prevalence of antisocial behaviour to involvement in crime, from the greater likelihood of drug and alcohol abuse to higher levels of teenage births, and from increased health care costs to a higher incidence of mental illness."
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