Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment she has made of the implications for her policies of trends in the level of youth unemployment since 2010.

Youth unemployment in 2010 was high following the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession. The unemployment rate for 16 to 24-year-olds for Jul-Sep 2024 is 14.8% (4.5 percentage points lower than in Jul-Sep 2010). In recent quarters the youth unemployment rate has been increasing. It has increased by 2.8 percentage points on the year.

To address this our plan to get Britain working includes a new Youth Guarantee for all young people aged 18-21 to ensure that they can access quality training opportunities, an apprenticeship or help to find work to reduce the number of young people not earning or learning. We are working with eight Youth Guarantee Trailblazers areas to test new ways of supporting young people into employment or training, by bringing together and enhancing existing programmes in partnership with local areas. We expect the trailblazers to launch from Spring 2025.

The White Paper also sets out a range of measures to prevent youth inactivity before 18 – including an expansion of work experience and careers advice, action to tackle school attendance and steps to improve access to mental health services for young people

Recent unemployment estimates are subject to heightened volatility due to ongoing data quality problems with the ONS Labour Force Survey. This is particularly the case for the 16 to 24-year-old group, which as a smaller population group has wider margins of error than whole population estimates. Additionally, data prior to Jun-Aug 2011 has not been re-weighted by the ONS causing a discontinuity.