3 hours ago
12
Today a new programme starts to help the million unemployed young people not in education or training (Neets). By chance, it launches on the day Andy Burnham set out to paint a picture of his horizons with plans that put the young first, closely matching Alan Milburn’s searing review of the fate of a “lost generation”.
As from now, any employer can claim £3,000 in a youth jobs grant to take on an 18- to 24-year-old who has been on universal credit and looking for work for at least six months. That financial incentive for employers will be well complemented by Burnham’s devolution revolution. The Burnham remedy is a great shift of power, funds and taxes out of Whitehall into the hands of local mayors, because local is where jobs are, locally is where education and further education succeed or fail and locality is all too often where disadvantage blights children’s future. Burnham’s confidence that the local works best for unemployment comes from the success of his Manchester “working well” programme, which has outstripped national schemes.
But work programmes are not easy. That £3,000 bribe is “not enough for the trouble”, say some. “Too much”, say others, warning of a costly deadweight in subsidising employers who would have hired them anyway. The Resolution Foundation’s response today was less than a ringing endorsement: this subsidy could employ an extra 2,800 young people a year at a cost of £36,700 each, it says. However, if that sounds expensive, it may be worth it, if it stops young people becoming permanently unemployable for lack of experience, saving a lifetime of benefits and depression.
The new jobs guarantee kicking off on Tuesday gets a better rating. Any employer taking on a harder-to-hire young person, out of work for more than 18 months, will get all their wages and costs paid. The three-year £2.5bn scheme begins after 13 weeks out of work, when the young are placed on “intensive work search”. A personal coach will from now on guarantee an apprenticeship, work experience, vocational training, further education or a Swap (sector-based work academy programme) that gives up to six weeks of vocational training in a college, with hands-on work experience and a promise of an interview for a genuine vacancy. That, says, the Resolution Foundation, will create 17,500 more jobs a year, at a similar cost to the youth jobs grant.
A host of old arguments litter the history of back-to-work schemes, their many acronyms signifying incentives, threats, bribes and often broken promises, with pilots and trials, some badly financed, others too punitive. But the one outstanding success was Labour’s flagship New Deal for young people launched in 1998: within two years it had outdone its target of finding work for 250,000 under-25s. By October 2001, the programme had helped 339,000 into jobs, reported the National Audit Office.
Can Labour do it again? Success last time came from the tone and optimism of newly trained work coaches. Back then, I sat in on many of the interviews and heard their enthusiasm spread to suspicious and anxious young people who had suffered too many rejections. The positive word soon spread that job centres were offering not humiliation, but genuine choices. As ever, there was always a necessary backstop: accept an option or lose the right to benefits. But unlike the later punitive sanctions regime under Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne, knocking people off benefits by trickery and spite was never the New Deal’s aim.
Preparing for the new youth guarantee, work coaches have been getting extra training; until now many have had huge caseloads and scant preparation. I spoke to a new employee of Severn Trent Water in Coventry who had applied for hundreds of jobs of every kind, high and low, over the year since she had left De Montfort University with a degree in business. She found her work coach knew little about available schemes: she only heard by accident of this eight-week placement, which is now leading her on to a graduate HR programme. Severn Trent, as part of a Department for Work and Pensions pilot programme, also takes many people with no qualifications and claims 100% of them pass their missing English and maths GCSE. Learning works better away from bad school experiences.
But Andy Burnham is reaching far beyond the mechanics of employment schemes, to the reasons why people become Neet. Intense pressure is on him over shrinking the welfare budget but he rejects “crude cuts”, promising a “preventative” approach. He takes up Milburn’s review, digging deep into generational, geographic, class, race and accidental injustice that blocks the way, bringing together local health and housing together with early years, where support makes most difference. Problems fragmented in Whitehall silos are better solved together in his Manchesterism. Expect radical changes to a school curriculum that alienates a third of children, reviving apprenticeships – the number of which has fallen by 35% for 16- to 24-year-olds since the apprenticeship levy was introduced in 2017 – and above all giving technical and further education equal funding and esteem as the rest of education.
Of course he expected attacks on his “No 10 of the North” plan for a Manchester outpost. “Tax raids on middle classes in Burnham’s 10-year plan,” splashed the Mail, warning “middle-class southerners” they were due for punishment. But northernness has been his asset, while government by and for the south has stoked much of the dangerous anti-politics, anti-Westminster ferocity that brought us Brexit. Everyone sees the world from where they are. But north and south alike are shocked by a million Neets, either moved by pity or anger at the benefits bill. Burnham is right to put them first, even though that means from now on he will find youth employment figures join NHS waiting lists as the yardstick of his government’s success.
after newsletter promotion
-
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
