A century ago Britain had a name for a job that paid a boy well and taught him nothing. It ended when he turned eighteen and got expensive

Britain has done this before, and it had a phrase for it.

At the turn of the twentieth century, reformers wrote about what they called blind alley jobs: errand boys, van boys, messenger boys, unskilled factory hands. They paid comparatively well for a fourteen year old walking out of school. They taught nothing. And they ended, routinely, when the boy turned eighteen or nineteen and was replaced by a cheaper school leaver.

At which point, in the words of the historian who compiled the evidence for the government, he was usually considered too old for training.

Hold that sentence. Too old for training, at nineteen.

A London headmaster in 1904 said his boys on leaving school almost invariably joined the army of errand boys and van guards, at eight to ten shillings a week and without prospects. He knew why. The wage was needed at home now, and the trades that would teach a boy something started him on less, and sometimes charged his family a fee for it.

Five years later the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws reached the conclusion the country would then spend a century failing to act on: that work offering no route into adult employment was disastrous, and that the boy thrown out at sixteen, seventeen, eighteen or twenty drifts into low-skilled labour, or into none at all.

Understand what those men were arguing against, because it had been the law of England, and had just been repealed.

The Statute of Artificers, passed in 1563, created the first national system of apprenticeship. No master might take more than three apprentices. The term ran seven years, ending at twenty-four, later reduced to twenty-one. It was Tudor social control and it was often harsh. It was also a law that made a training grade compulsory. Nobody could practise a trade without one.

Parliament repealed it in 1814, two hundred and fifty-one years later, when apprenticeship had fallen out of favour and factory conditions made the idea look like exploitation. What replaced it was nothing. Employers could train the young, or not, as they chose. Within two generations reformers were watching fourteen year olds walk into jobs that ended at nineteen.

The recovery took a very long time, and it worked. More than 340,000 apprentices a year by the early 1900s. By the 1960s a third of boys left school straight into an apprenticeship. That was the high point. In 1968 a Royal Commission called the system a farce that taught less than a short course would. By 1995 there were half as many apprentices in work as in 1979.

And then, in 2009, Parliament passed an Act creating a duty to offer an apprenticeship place to every qualified sixteen to nineteen year old who wanted one and did not have one.

That duty never came into force. It was removed by the Education Act 2011 before it ever commenced. Britain wrote itself an obligation to provide a first job, and deleted it before anyone could claim it.

Which brings us to tonight. The cliff is no longer at eighteen, and it is no longer set by employers' habits. It is at twenty-one, and it is written into HMRC's rate tables: nothing on the wages of a twenty year old, fifteen per cent on those of a twenty-two year old.

**Why it matters here.** Nobody designed that. It is the residue of a relief introduced for one reason and a rate rise introduced for another, and it happens to land on the year a graduate leaves university. But nobody designed the blind alley either. It was what you got when the law stopped requiring anyone to train the young. The lesson here is not that the machine is coming. It is that when Britain stops watching how it prices its youngest workers, the market answers on its own, and the answer is always the same: hire them cheap, let them go before they cost anything.