Youth mobility schemes have been hitting the headlines again, with politicians and commentators taking us on a rollercoaster of whether the UK and the EU will or won’t seal the deal. The briefing tussle has seen the proposed scheme liberally compared to everything from ‘a return to freedom of movement’ (it isn’t) right through to ‘taking a gap year’ (it also isn’t). So let’s take a look at what youth mobility schemes actually are, and why they really, just maybe, aren’t something people should be getting so worried about.
Youth mobility schemes are agreements between governments which allow young people, usually in the age ranges of 18-30ish, to work and/or study abroad for a limited time. Usually, for 2 years. They are normally reciprocal — allowing young people from one country to go to the other one, and vice versa — and are almost always capped, often to a few thousand spaces per year.
Anyone interested in the scheme has to prove they have enough savings and wait for the government to approve their application. They also need to pay a fee just to apply, and, in the UK’s case, pay a hefty ‘health surcharge’ for every year spent in the UK. Once in the UK, they can’t get any public funds, such as benefits, or bring any family members.
This is a far cry from buying a one way ticket from a budget airline and deciding you are never coming back, or relying on the bank of mum and dad for a year while you figure out what you want to do with your life. While offering no route to residency or citizenship, youth mobility schemes are a more formalised application to spend an extended period of time working, studying and living abroad, than a mere short-term tourist visa.
And, they’re nothing new. The UK already has such agreements with 13 other countries including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and India. In Australia, the scheme is called a ‘working holiday scheme’, while in Canada, they call it an ‘international experience scheme’. The different naming conventions also hint at their purpose. These schemes are neither fully-fledged working visas, nor student visas. They sit right in between the two: allowing young people to gain new skills for a limited period, by being economically productive and immersing themselves in a different culture. We could even call ours a UK-EU cultural exchange scheme. The people that benefit from such schemes bring skills and experiences back home with them, and in the process, bring their home and host countries closer together. They are ideally suited to countries and blocs of countries seeking a closer relationship or a ‘relationship reset’.
The maximum number of annual visas granted also varies greatly; for 2024, our youth mobility scheme with Uruguay is capped at 500 people, while our scheme with Canada is capped at 8,000, and Australia a healthy 45,000 places.
The only thing that is new about youth mobility schemes, is the furore over a proposed EU-UK youth mobility scheme. Indeed, the original 2008 Canada-UK youth mobility scheme was expanded as recently as 2023, without much fanfare, when we agreed our UK-Canada Free Trade Agreement. Likewise, the Australia-UK and New Zealand-UK schemes also came into effect in 2023, under the then Sunak-led Conservative government, as part of our new post-Brexit trade deals with both countries. Furthermore, Sunak’s Conservative government was so keen on youth mobility schemes, that they even tried agreeing them with France, Germany and Spain. Shortly after that, long-time Brexiteer and former UKIP councillor turned former conservative minister George Eustice broke cover a year ago to help Sunak get the schemes off the ground.
So why is everyone getting so wound up with what seems to be an otherwise sensible opportunity-generating policy for young people?
Some suggest that it is an inherent fear of any policy including the words ‘movement’ and ‘EU’, being misinterpreted as the UK government returning to ‘free movement’ with the EU. So does anyone know what the public thinks about them? Yes we do. In fact, we (collectively) know lots. Our own polling from March this year found that three in five (59%) think the UK should negotiate a youth mobility scheme with the EU, compared to just 15% who oppose the idea.
More recently, in August this year, More in Common found that a staggering 71% of people who voted Labour at the General Election in July supported the scheme, as well as a majority (56%) of Conservative voters. Reassuringly, even 44% of Reform UK voters support a youth mobility scheme — only 27% were against it. The policy is clearly quite popular.
Others have suggested that fear of the scheme may be due to the uncertainty surrounding how any UK-EU youth mobility scheme would impact net migration figures in the UK (god forbid they were to go up, right?). Ignoring for a second that it would be within the government’s gift to negotiate a cap, allowing them to control the number of people arriving in the UK, there may be an even bigger misconception at play: that more people would come to the UK than would leave it.
According to a recent investigation, the UK Home Office puts the total number of people who came to the UK across all 13 existing youth mobility schemes in 2023 at a mere 23,000 people. At the same time, publicly available data shows that more than 26,000 young Brits left the UK on the Australia scheme alone. Add to that the additional 8,000 Brits that left for New Zealand in the same time period and a clearer picture starts to emerge: current youth mobility schemes are bringing down net migration in the UK.
Even without data from the other countries with whom we have schemes in place, on the basis of the data from Australia alone, the numbers already show that worries about a reciprocal youth mobility deal with the EU on the grounds of net migration, could be misplaced.
Some might argue that Britain is more attractive to Europeans than to Australians or New Zealanders, but past migration figures show that when growth is stagnant e.g 1980 and 1981, and as it is now, thousands more people travelled to Europe from Britain than the other way around. And now that Europeans will be faced with costs and time limits to partake in a UK scheme when they can travel to 26 other member states for free and indefinitely, it is not unreasonable to assume that more British people will partake in a reciprocal youth mobility scheme than EU citizens.
EU and UK leaders are under similar pressures from their domestic audiences over economic growth and immigration, so when Keir Starmer and Ursula Von der Leyen meet today in Brussels, let’s hope the evidence speaks for itself.
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