Could the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, Raleigh International or Youthbuild, a charity that shows young people how to saw, hammer and lay bricks, offer Gordon Brown a way out of recession, gloom and the prospect of mass youth unemployment?

We’re not suggesting that the prime minister himself help build an orphanage in Peru - though it might be a jolly break from Westminster - but that the proven ability of such organisations to harness youthful energy and build team spirit could provide the inspiration for a new national civic service scheme.

Let’s call it Service UK: the scheme would pay every youngster a modest amount to spend a minimum of six months working on projects supporting Britain’s children, the sick and elderly, the environment and international development. The benefits could be huge, not just for young people, but also in meeting social needs. Daily visits to help with shopping and gardening could keep thousands of elderly citizens out of care homes. A youthful army of mentors, reading coaches and school sports aides could bring new opportunities to schoolchildren. Environmental projects could prevent and protect us from the effects of a changing climate.

Such a scheme, even if compulsory, would be popular - a poll in the next issue of Prospect magazine indicates that 64% of British people would back it. Their support has resonance in the light of the recent Good Childhood inquiry, which showed how modern teenagers leap ever earlier into an adult world, without the rites of passage that once helped them cope.

Teenagers grow older, faster; but they emerge into adulthood sceptical about whether there is such a thing as society - and, even if there is, what it’s got to do with them. Too many end up as Neets (not in education, employment or training) because their schools fail to teach the soft skills - teamworking, determination, even the ability to look an employer in the eye - that employers want. National civic service could provide these skills and mark the start of adulthood.

Most importantly, in terms of social bonding, the children of Britain’s poorest families could work alongside the rich, even the offspring of royalty. All would graduate together.

How would the scheme work? Young people could take part at any time between the ages of 16 and 25, although most would do their service between school and university, or before finding a job. They could choose one of three broad paths: involving children, the elderly and sick, or the environment.

Each young person would then be assigned to their own 50-strong corps. Stage one would be a month of group activity - perhaps an adventure training mission or a construction project - taking place away from home. Stage two would be six months of core service close to home. Stage three would be an optional international service period. As the course ended, each corps would get together again before a public citizenship and coming-of-age ceremony.

Such an undertaking would, of course, require an unprecedented effort from the voluntary and private sectors. It would also need a new coordinating institution - Service UK, let’s say - to provide a framework (and funds), with jobs for thousands of mentors and youth workers.

Critics will say such a programme is illiberal, expensive and ineffectual; a tax on the young, and a way of funding state services on the cheap while sapping the strength from the existing voluntary sector. But this need not be true. Civic service would give focus to today’s fragmented efforts. All parents, at least, would have an incentive to help out: this would not be something that just happened to other people’s children.

With an annual intake of up to 500,000 teenagers, a compulsory programme would cost many billions. Some of this money could come out of education budgets, perhaps by postponing the plan to raise the school leaving age. The rest could be justified as part of the push to boost the economy out of recession. Franklin Roosevelt did something similar with his Civilian Conservation Corps - Roosevelt’s “tree army” - just weeks after taking office in 1933.

Gordon Brown supported national voluntary service while in opposition; David Cameron has plans for a national voluntary programme for every teenager, even if only for six weeks. But if idealism isn’t enough to convince Brown or Cameron of the benefits of a compulsory scheme, perhaps they might consider the fictional example of Francis Urquhart, the scheming prime minister of Michael Dobbs’s 1990s television dramas, House of Cards and To Play the King. Facing electoral defeat, Urquhart wins an unlikely electoral victory by announcing a bold plan to reintroduce national military service. In real life, perhaps national civic service could do the same.

A longer version of this article appears in the March issue of Prospect

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