Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what recent assessment her Department has made of the effect of the Kickstart scheme on levels of youth unemployment in (a) Coventry North East constituency and (b) Coventry.

The Department for Work and Pensions will be monitoring and evaluating the Kickstart scheme throughout and after its implementation.

Delivering the Kickstart Scheme at pace has led to a limited data set which makes it harder to accurately present a snapshot of a smaller geographical area. We are continuing to develop our data, which may help in sharing constituency level information in due course.

However, as of the 3rd June 2021 we are able to provide that in the ONS defined region of the West Midlands (which includes the Coventry North East constituency and Coventry), around 12,840 Kickstart jobs had been made available for young people to apply for and around 2,800 jobs have been started by young people on the Kickstart Scheme.

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.