- YOUNG people are saddling themselves with debt by spending more on takeaways than other age groups because they cannot cook. A survey has revealed that 16-24-year-olds are spending an average £63.65 a week on food, compared with a typical spend for all adults of £57.30.
Despite earning the least, they spend £19.61 on takeaways compared with the adult average of £11.31, and £28.26 eating out (average £17.22).
The poll of 5,000 adults found that the average 16 to 24-year-old knows how to cook only four recipes, and 14% of young adults also said they ate no fruit or vegetables at all.
Children’s food campaigner Henry Dimbleby, who cofounded the natural fast-food chain Leon, said: “We’ve got two generations now where primary cooking skills have been lost.”
- LONDON’s housing crisis will cost the capital almost £3billion this year in lost consumer spending, according to a major new study on the economic impact of the homes shortage.
Crippling rents and mortgages in the capital – where house prices have doubled in a decade – will result in the “unnecessary” loss of £2.7bn from the consumer pay packet in 2015, according to research carried out by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR).
The sum represents 1.6% of total consumer spending in London and amounts to a combined loss of £14.5bn in economic output over 2006 to 2020.
- AGE 16 is the time when we feel most optimistic about the future, but by the age of 22 a sense of reality begins to kick in.
Research for charity Barnardo’s asked 975 people aged 14 to 22 from across all socio-economic backgrounds how positive they felt about their future life chances.
Overall, only 9% of 14 to 16 year olds agreed ‘people like me don’t have much of a chance in life’, but for 17 to 19 year olds, the proportion almost doubled, and for 20 to 22 year olds it rose to more than one in five.
The research also revealed that 63 per cent of those who feel they are ‘among the worst-off’ think they will struggle to get a job even if they do well in school.
Barnardo’s chief executive Javed Khan said: “Young people should be full of optimism for their future, but before they’ve even left school they already feel trapped by their circumstances and limited by their life chances.”
- SCHOOL leavers who only have the grades to get into a mediocre university may be financially better off taking up an apprenticeship, a report suggests.
Analysis by the Sutton Trust charity found that youngsters who carry out high-quality apprenticeships earn more on average than those who go to non-elite universities.
The study will give weight to arguments that so-called ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees in non-traditional subjects at poorly performing universities are poor value for money. Business leaders have long warned that for many jobs, hands-on industry experience can be much more valuable than academic study.
The report calculates that those who undertake a Level 4 higher apprenticeship earn around the same on average in their lifetime as someone at a non-elite university.
- GREEK tycoons who bought expensive properties in Britain in recent years are being pursued by Athens for potential tax evasion.
Finance ministry officials in Greece said that the UK government had provided it with two lists naming 3,200 Greek nationals who had snapped up properties in London and other cities during the financial crisis. These include 372 multimillion-pound properties in some of London’s prime investment areas.
It also emerged that the Greek government is considering levying a property tax of around 1 per cent on all homes bought abroad by Greek taxpayers and is drawing up a property register to enforce this.
