Baroness Stowell of Beeston
My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend Lord Chadlington for securing this debate. I feel as strongly about youth unemployment as everyone else who has spoken today. First, I associate myself with the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, about presentation and the importance of communication. Like the noble Lord, I believe it is essential that people get it right because there is only one chance to make a first impression.
I also very much share the views of the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, about the importance of vocational education and of people having a clear route to success via that road if an academic route is not right for them. It may interest noble Lords to know that I was a teenager in the early 1980s and did not go to university. I do not remember anybody encouraging me to go but that may have been because I desperately wanted to go to work. I was very fortunate to have two wonderful parents, who said to me that getting a job, being dedicated to it and doing it to the best of my ability would be a route to success. I will leave others to judge whether I have achieved success so far but I very much understand how important it is for those who do not naturally want to follow an academic route to have other clear options available to them.
Youth unemployment is still too high in this country, as my noble friend Lord Chadlington made clear. However, the levels of worklessness among some young people cannot simply be put down to the present state of the economy. The problem we face, as noble Lords have indicated in their comments today, is much more entrenched than that. For the past decade and longer, too many of our young people have been trapped on the margins, some of them growing up without positive role models or in families where no one has ever held a job, failed by underperforming schools or dropping out of education without any qualifications, and ending up in the jobcentre at 18, unready for the world of work.
Even before the recession, youth unemployment had started to rise. In 2001, just over half a million young people were unemployed. By 2007, that number had already increased to just over 700,000. As all noble Lords agree, we cannot afford to neglect the next generation. Whether it be keeping them in school or vocational training, or helping them into work, this Government are committed to supporting young people, ensuring that they realise their potential.
Even in these tough economic times, we have seen that it is possible to make some progress. Youth unemployment is down by 72,000 in this quarter alone. If you take out those in full-time education, that fall is even greater—down 90,000 to 626,000, the lowest figure since the beginning of 2009. However, we are not complacent, and I am not here to talk down the situation. There are promising signs that the steps we are taking to tackle youth unemployment are having an effect but, clearly, we need to do more.
I will come to online issues in a moment but will first say something about investment and how we have radically changed the way we are approaching the issue of youth unemployment in this coalition Government. Through the £1 billion Youth Contract, this Government have brought together previously piecemeal provision and underpinned it by greater funding, scope and ambition. With the DWP, the DfE and BIS working together, the contract offers intensive employment support for young people, targeted at addressing the particular barriers they face.
We know that a lack of experience often proves a problem, so we are creating an extra 250,000 work experience places over the next three years. Of 65,000 young people who have started work experience already, nearly half are off benefits 21 weeks later. We know that for businesses, employing a young person comes with both a cost and a risk attached, which is why we are offering 20,000 new apprenticeship grants and 160,000 wage incentives to encourage employers to take on young people. By easing the costs, it becomes more straightforward to give young people a chance. However, we are also emphasising the potential benefits to employers, which is incredibly important—a point made most forcefully by my noble friend Lord Chadlington. As he said, young people are what is known now as “digitally native” and can offer skills that are valuable to businesses, certainly to small and medium-sized businesses that might not naturally have those skills already available to them in their existing workforce.
In the DWP, alongside these valuable interventions, we are harnessing online tools and channels ensuring that our employment services reflect how claimants—and young people in particular—choose to interact. I have given a range of examples but the most recent and significant is the Universal Jobmatch; an online service which has transformed the way people look for and find work. It is simpler and quicker for jobseekers to use, with alerts when new jobs are posted. It provides a free service for employers, and the service also benefits Jobcentre Plus advisers by modernising how they review claimants’ work search activity.
However, as the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, said, we must recognise that not all people have access to the internet, and that not everybody has the skills to be able to use these kinds of services. I would say to the noble Lord that even the most basic jobs these days do require some form of digital skill, even if it is just data-entry in a warehouse. We must recognise that if someone is not able to use some of our online services to find jobs, it is our responsibility to make sure that they are trained so that they can use those services, because they will need those skills once they arrive at work. I was interested to hear that the initiative that the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, said that he launched when he first entered the House of the Lords was his e-learning foundation and the provision of devices. I wish him continued success with that.
I turn now to what we are doing for those still in school and the points made by my noble friend Lord Chadlington about online communication to promote opportunities—all of which I agree with. I believe that the bottom-up approach and co-ordinating our effort are not mutually exclusive—neither is his point about tone. We need to do all these things, as well as learn from what works in the private sector and be open to new initiatives that we do not run ourselves.
One national service that is available is the National Careers Service, which was launched in April last year. It supports young people in making training and career choices. I note what my noble friend said about some of the services available, but I am sure that a service that is less than a year old is seeking to improve what it offers continually, learning from the experiences of those who use it.
UCAS is independent of government and provides an online application service for those wanting to pursue further and higher education. Picking up one of the points that my noble friend made about ensuring that there is co-ordination of services, it is worth reminding ourselves that one of the advantages of the digital and online world is that users like to be able to access data and adapt it—to use it in ways that best suit their needs. That lends itself to—and points towards—not necessarily having a single shop that is nationwide and available, but making something accessible so that people can adapt it.
The Government have recently made data available that compares university courses—this is on a website that we run called Unistats—but we are also making that data widely available. The consumer service Which? has taken advantage of this and has already adapted that material into its website, which is available to those who want to be able to see and compare directly how different courses might provide the kind of training and education that they want.
The National Apprenticeship Service provides information on a nationwide basis, but we know that there is more we can do to promote the schemes available. We think that the idea set out by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in his article in the Financial Times earlier this week—that UCAS should become an integrated higher education and apprenticeships service—is a great one. We have noticed that UCAS is enthusiastic about this as well and David Willetts is already pursuing this.
All these national services are tweeting and using social media to communicate what they are doing. I myself have retweeted things in the past to promote what they are doing. But we must be careful that we do not try to control too much from the centre. As with the great initiative that the noble Lord, Lord Mitchell, referred to, TheJobCrowd, if something is working and people are using it, far be it from us to seek to control it.
As my noble friend said, plotr.co.uk is a new website arising from a partnership of businesses in response to the Prime Minister’s direct challenge to find new ways to inspire young people to broaden their horizons. That is something that we want to see continue. However, as and when new local schemes, such as the Jobs Network, which my noble friend mentioned, get off the ground and achieve results, we want to hear about them so that we can promote them to other schools for heads to consider. Earlier I talked about today’s debate to my honourable friend Matthew Hancock, the Minister for Skills, who works out of both BIS and the Department for Education. He asked me to inform my noble friend that he would welcome learning more about the Jobs Network.
The noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, pointed to the risk to young offenders of long-term unemployment. It is worth pointing out that when young offenders are released they are referred directly to the Work Programme at the start of their claim. This provides intensive support and providers are incentivised to support this group as being in need of particular support. Perhaps the noble Lord is aware that there was a debate earlier this week specifically about support and training for young offenders. If he has not had an opportunity to read that debate in Hansard, he might be interested in the response that my noble friend Lord Ahmad gave to that debate.
In conclusion, we cannot underestimate the challenge of youth unemployment, especially in an uncertain economy, nor the damage we would do if we did not support our young people to be ambitious for success. By providing more training, work experience and opportunities for young people via the online channels that they use readily and often, we are giving individuals a chance to prove themselves and to secure a better future, which everyone here today wants to achieve. From a personal point of view, we must ensure that we do not define success too narrowly. For me, success is doing what you do as best as you can, and I want all young people to be able to experience that.