Unemployment

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Wednesday 26th January 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Freud]

Yes, an effective strategy has to be built around employers, and we are doing quite a few things. The most important one was the introduction earlier this month of work experience. The idea is to give eight weeks’ work experience to young people aged between 18 and 21 who are not in university, while they continue to collect benefit. We are also looking to introduce later this year the academy programme, which combines work experience with elements of training to introduce people to work.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, as a Minister, I introduced something very similar to those new work experience programmes. We should note that between 1997 and the beginning of the recession claimant youth unemployment fell by 40 per cent. We have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Young, that unemployment for 18 to 24 year-olds increased from 17.7 per cent to 18.1 per cent in the last quarter. Is this because of the cuts to the Future Jobs Fund, the ending of the young person’s guarantee, the cuts to the education maintenance allowance and the raising of the cost of going to university; or is it because of bad weather?

[Lord Freud]

My Lords, I think that it is important that we do not get cheap on the movements: this is, as always, a very complicated set of movements. During the last month, for instance, the claimant count went down a little for the youngsters. It went up by 30,000 or so, but has been broadly flat since 2009. There will be reasons for the figure being up a bit, but I do not think that is the point. The point is that we have a serious underlying structural problem. We have about 600,000 youngsters who have not managed to get sustained employment after education. Within that figure, I do not have the exact number about whom we should be seriously worried. Of the 16 to 17 year-olds, it is about 50,000. These are youngsters who may never make the transition into proper economic activity. It is vital that we have structures to help them make that transition.