The problem with the Tories’ plan for young people
06 Mar 2026
This article was first published in CapX.
On Good Morning Britain last week, Kemi Badenoch laid out her plan to address Britain’s intergenerational inequality. Her message was clear: student loans are unfair, graduates face a heavy burden and reform is overdue.
For most of the past decade, despite its modernisation, youth policy has not exactly been the animating force of the modern Tory party. Yet now we are offered interest relief on Plan 2 loans and talk of banning social media for under-16s. Could it be that the Conservatives are taking young people seriously?.
But scratch the surface and two different tactical plays emerge. Both are dressed up as ‘youth policies’, yet neither is truly designed to win the vote of young people.
Take the proposed ban on social media for under-16s. There is broad consensus on addictive algorithms, mental health and the sometimes-corrosive effects social media can have on adolescents. The online world is not a pastoral idyll. Yet the politics of the ban tell their own story.
Support is strongest among parents, particularly those in the 25-49 bracket. Many of this category would not have grown up with social media or used it anywhere near as often, or been exposed to it as young, as those among the 18-24 bracket. Yet YouGov polling suggests that only 21 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds “strongly support” the ban, compared to a whopping 43 per cent of 25 to 49 year olds.
But there lies the issue. Leaving aside the significant questions of implementation and enforcement, a policy restricting teenage behaviour will always poll better with mothers and fathers than with youngsters themselves. A measure that primarily impacts the young – who can’t even vote – but derives its political energy from their elders is not youth policy. If they even care at all by the time they reach the voting age (even if that gets lowered to 16), it’s hard to imagine the youth vote being uniformly grateful to the Tories for attempting to bump them offline.
The student loans pivot is playing a different game.
Lowering interest rates on Plan 2 loans sounds like a solitary moment of relief for a generation saddled with five-figure balances before they have even set foot on the property ladder. But in practice, reducing interest disproportionately benefits those who will be able to remove their shackles and repay their loans in full within 30 years. In other words, those least likely to need said relief.
For a large share of graduates, the total debt figure is closer to an abstraction than a financial reality. A graduate earning a modest salary will continue to pay 9% above the threshold regardless of the headline interest rate under the Tories’ policy. What determines the real burden is the repayment threshold, something Rachel Reeves has been unwilling to increase.
Why then are the Tories floating these policies? It’s clever party politics.
The present Labour Government is constrained where it matters most: the public finances. Growth is anaemic and debt hovers at crippling levels. Any meaningful loosening, whether through higher loan thresholds, risks widening the deficit and inviting market scrutiny.
By floating policies framed as compassionate, but which can carry fiscal implications, the Conservatives place Labour in a bind. If they reject the Tory policy, they seem like the bad guys. Lowering interest rates has the gloss of compassion while shifting pressure onto a fiscally constrained Treasury. The social media ban, by contrast, carries emotional resonance at negligible direct cost.
Two different manoeuvres. One cultural and one fiscal. But both share the common feature of generating political pressure without the Conservatives having to confront the deeper issues facing younger voters.
The irony is that the structural grievances of Britain’s younger generations are neither obscure nor trivial. If a party wanted to secure the long-term vote of younger generations, the answer is simple. Rip up the Town and Country Planning Act, which throttles housing supply by enforcing planning constraints that inflate asset prices and exclude first-time buyers. Real wage growth has been sluggish, and the tax system leans heavily on earned income. But banning apps is easier. So is trimming interest rates.
Young voters turn out less reliably and crucially when they do, they tend to vote leftward. In the 2024 general election, 41% of those aged 18 to 24 voted for Starmer’s Labour Party and just 5% for Badenoch’s Conservatives. No serious strategist believes that a tweak to loan interest or a ban on apps will suddenly reverse that arithmetic.
If the Conservatives were serious about winning the youth vote outright, they would drop these performative headlines and focus on policies that would actually make life better for young people if they voted Tory. This would require structural reform on such issues as housing supply, tax and labour markets. However, this would unsettle core parts of the existing (or at least historic) Conservative coalition: Nimby homeowners, and vocal pensioners. At some point, the Conservatives are going to have to risk upsetting them.
For years, the Conservative Party has been accused of being the party of the old and the propertied. There is now evidently some desire to shed that image and compete for the next generation, even more so with Labour’s gerrymandering by promising 16-year-olds the vote. But if youth policy becomes merely another instrument in the party’s broader contest with Labour – cultural wedge here, fiscal trap there – it will struggle to convince the very voters it purports to champion.
Young voters are not naive. They understand that parties across the spectrum attempt to instrumentalise them as a voter bloc. Labour have been successful for years, advertising themselves as a party of social justice.
If the Conservatives move beyond soundbites and tackle the structural issues facing younger voters, they may yet see a dividend at the ballot box. As they continue to languish in the polls, a serious attempt to harness the youth vote might prove less of a gimmick and more of a gamble worth taking.