Cost of living: Gwynedd teen needs second job for driving lessons

Beca said she was grateful that her job paid above the minimum wage for her age, but the £1,400 she earned each month was not enough to afford driving lessons, pay her bills, buy food and pay for train and bus fare.

She said she felt many people her age were exhausted by the cost of living.

“I’ve noticed that a lot of people my age going into hospitality, a lot of them drop out of college like I did,” she said.

“Rent is like £700 a month, that’s just not possible on an 18-year-old’s wage.

“I guess you could call us anti-social – it’s just that we don’t have the money to go anywhere, we don’t have the money to go to the pubs like [our parents] used to.”

Beca’s mum Delyth agreed that things were getting harder for her children.

The 46-year-old charity manager, who is a single mum to three, said she had to make clear to her children that they could not “rely on the bank of mum to bail them out”.

She added: “This generation now, they’ve gone through all that lockdown and lost out on so much.

“When I was younger, if you wanted to go and have a night out it was always manageable somehow and I wasn’t from a rich family. Now they have to budget for everything.”