Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many and what proportion of Kickstart placements have been made available in rural areas.

Delivering the Kickstart Scheme at pace has meant an initial concentration on the production of a limited data set. The geographic data we produce does not currently include rural/urban classification. We do hold regional information on jobs made available for young people to apply for and for placements started which can be seen in the table below, as of 3rd June.

As of the 3rd June there have been 138,000 jobs advertised and over 31,000 Kickstart job placement starts in total since the scheme started. The tables below show these figures split by location and the data presented has been rounded according to DWP statistical rounding convention. Although care is taken when processing and analysing Kickstart applications, referrals and starts, the data collected might be subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system which has been developed quickly. The management information presented here has not been subjected to the usual standard of quality assurance associated with official statistics, but is provided in the interests of transparency. Work is ongoing to improve the quality of information available for the programme.