Reigniting British Ambition

Britain needs its young people to want more. Too many settle for safe jobs, safe choices and safe opinions. They wait to be told, avoid the leap, and treat ambition as faintly embarrassing.

This is not a flaw in the national character. The same people who built railways across continents and split the atom did not lack nerve. Ambition is a habit, and habits are shaped by what we reward, what we permit and what we celebrate.

For decades we have rewarded caution, forbidden risk and celebrated almost everyone except those who build things. That can be reversed. Seven proposals would make a start.

1. Let children roam

Risk-aversion is learned in childhood. In 1971 about eight in ten English seven- and eight-year-olds walked to school on their own. By 1990 fewer than one in ten did. The figure has never recovered.

A child who is driven everywhere, supervised always and shielded from every scrape grows into an adult who expects the same. A child who climbs trees, crosses roads and comes home with a grazed knee learns something no lesson can teach, that setbacks are survivable.

Government should strip back the guidance that turns playgrounds into padded cells and school trips into paperwork. Councils should design streets that children can use. Schools should make independent travel the norm, not the exception. And the law should make it clear that letting a sensible child out alone is good parenting, not neglect.

2. Revive the Saturday job

In the late 1990s nearly half of 16- and 17-year-olds had a part-time job. Today it is about a quarter. The paper round, the shop counter and the café shift have quietly vanished.

They taught more than many classrooms. Turn up on time. Please the customer. Earn the money, then decide how to spend it. A teenager with a wage learns that effort brings reward and that independence is worth having.

The child employment by-laws, many dating from another age, should be swept away and replaced with one simple national rule. Employers should face no extra paperwork for hiring a 15-year-old for a few hours a week. Let the young work, and they will want to work.

3. Make failure cheap and honourable

In ambitious cultures a failed venture is a credential. In Britain it is still a confession. Our bankruptcy law is forgiving on paper, but the stigma lingers long after the discharge.

We should go further. A fast-track, low-cost insolvency route for small first ventures would let young founders fail, learn and try again within months, not years. Credit records should treat an honest business failure differently from personal default.

The culture matters as much as the law. Universities and schools should invite in founders who flopped and bounced back, and let them talk about what went wrong. The message should be plain. Trying and failing beats never trying at all.

4. Build the homes

Nobody leaps without somewhere to land. A young person paying half their income in rent has no savings, no cushion and no room for error. Every risk looks reckless when one bad month means missing the rent.

A generation ago, a house was the collateral that started countless small businesses. Today many under-35s will never own one. The cause is no mystery. Britain has made building almost impossible, and the young pay the price.

The planning system should move to a presumption in favour of development, with clear rules set in advance rather than case-by-case permission. Let towns grow upwards and outwards. Cheaper homes would do more for youthful daring than any number of motivational campaigns.

5. Stop taxing the climb

The tax system sends a strange signal to the striving. Between £100,000 and £125,140 the personal allowance is withdrawn, creating an effective marginal rate of 60 percent. That is precisely the point where talented young professionals arrive. We tell them to aim high, then fine them for hitting the target. The taper should go. So should the cliff edges elsewhere that punish people for earning a little more.

Some schemes already work well. SEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme), EIS (Enterprise Investment Scheme), and EMI (Enterprise Management Incentives) are three popular, UK government-backed tax-advantaged schemes designed to help early-stage and growing companies attract cash and key talent.

These share options reward people who back new businesses and those who join them. They should be expanded, simplified and promoted far beyond London and the tech sector. A young engineer in Sunderland should know about them as surely as one in Shoreditch.

6. Change the stories

Young people aim at what they see. British culture lavishes praise on footballers, pop stars and reality TV winners, and regards business success with faint suspicion. The entrepreneur appears in drama mainly as villain, rarely as hero.

We need more visible role models who built something from nothing, especially from unglamorous towns and ordinary backgrounds. Honours lists should recognize founders and inventors as readily as administrators. Broadcasters could give enterprise the airtime they give to baking.

A national prize for young builders, with real money and real prestige, would signal that the country admires those who create. Show the young that ambition is admired, and more of them will admit to having it.

7. Reward boldness in schools

Our exams prize the avoidance of error. Students learn that the safest route to a good grade is to play it safe. That lesson sticks.

Schools should give real weight to competition, debate, coding challenges and ambitious projects where pupils can try, stumble and try again with little at stake. Every secondary school should run student businesses that trade with real money and real customers.

Prizes should go to the audacious attempt as well as the correct answer. A pupil who aims at something hard and falls short has learned more than one who aimed low and hit it. Teach the young to stretch, and they will keep stretching long after they leave.

From why bother to why not

None of these measures alone will transform a national temperament. Together they shift the default. Freedom in childhood, work in adolescence, forgiveness for failure, a roof that does not ruin you and a tax system that does not punish success add up to a country where reaching high feels normal.

Britain was once famous for its daring. It built an empire, invented much of the modern world, and then decided it was rather bad form to mention it.

Madsen Pirie