I've had a read around and it seems like National Service has 2 options:
- 1 year of military training with a salary.
- 1 weekend a month of unpaid work in public services.
The sanctions for not doing this are unknown apart from jail not being one of them.
I personally think that this whole plan is ill-guided. People deserve to be paid fairly, for their work; they should not have to do military training (which is not even possible for many groups, such as some disabled people) to be compensated.
There is also the problem of how many 18-year-olds are in full-time education or employment. Those teens will likely end up having to do 12 days straight of work/schooling every month, which cannot be good for their mental health or education/productivity.
I believe the right way to encourage young people into public service is to promote it to them while still letting them decide to do or not do it. This could be through:
- Targeting public service vacancy ads at teens.
- Encouraging public services to engage with teens more.
- Updating the Baker Clause to require (more) discussion of public service jobs, or otherwise promote such jobs in schools and colleges.
- Providing more funding to education subjects that commonly lead to public service jobs, such as Uniformed Protective Services and Health & Social Care.
- Having a higher minimum wage for public service jobs, such as setting it as the living wage regardless of age for such jobs.