A case of being laughable

Now here’s something to laugh at - David Cameron and Nick Clegg were together at an event yesterday to launch a government drive on youth unemployment.

The prime minister and his deputy will announce a £60m package to boost work prospects and vocational education.

They will commit in their appearance in London to tackle "structural barriers" to young people starting a career.

The launch comes a year after Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron walked into Downing Street together.

The government said it would provide funding for 250,000 more apprenticeships over the next four years and 100,000 work placements over the next two years.

More than 100 large companies and tens of thousands of small businesses had pledged to offer work experience places, ministers added.

Mr Cameron said: "It's time to reverse the trend of rising youth unemployment that has held back our country for far too long and help our young people get the jobs on which their future - and ours - depends.

"But government can't act alone. We need employers who are prepared to give young people a go.

"So I'm delighted that over 100 large companies and tens of thousands of small and medium sized enterprises have already responded to our call for work experience placements so that tens of thousands of young people can take those vital first steps in experiencing the world of work."

Mr Clegg said: "We all have a responsibility - government, business, charities, education providers - to work together to find a solution."

But TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said the proposals failed to match the guarantees given by the now cut Future Jobs Fund.

"The best thing the government could do is stop their deep rapid spending cuts that are running the whole economy into the ground, with the young as the worst victims,"

How absolutely true, but come on Brendan, surely you can do better than that? Almost a quarter of young people are without work and despite their best efforts the government have not been able to reverse the trend. Work experience is all very well, but it isn’t paid employment and it isn’t permanent. Moreover, the government are pitching their money on the private sector being wiling and able to pick up the tab of employing all these young people, but with inflation likely to rise to 5% over the coming year, industry is going to be hard-pushed to be competitive anyway – and that’s without the additional staff numbers coming from youth.

Citizen Dave and Tricky Nicky need to get their acts together and recognise there is a very real problem affecting an entire generation and it will not go away unless the government are prepared to invest in programmes that can help young people secure permanent and sustainable employment. Half-hearted measures that pay lip service to the needs of the young are an embarrassment and need to be treated with total scorn. These measures will do nothing to address the number of young people unemployed and it will give little to allay the fears of those set to leave school in June.

What baffles me is how few people see the lack of care Citizen Dave and Tricky Nicky have for the people of this country. Dave is the worst kind of Tory – a Thatcherite with a PR face. On face value he looks squeaky clean, but when you aren’t looking he’ll rip your heart out and laugh as he’s doing it. As for Clegg, he is just a puppet following his master’s will, but make no mistake, he knows what he is doing and, even worse, he agrees with Tory policy.

No hope for our young people

In the next hour we will hear how youth unemployment has exceeded 1 million people – an entire generation consigned to the waste bin. According to The Times today, 33% of the population of Merthyr Tydfil are claiming unemployment benefit.

If the upward trend of leaving young people jobless and without a future we will find ourselves in the same boat as Ireland with 31.9% youth unemployment, or Greece with 36.1%.

And what is the government doing about it? Quite honestly very little. News yesterday of regional grants that will bring 40,000 jobs to the West Midlands alone must be welcomed, but these will not happen straight away – they will filter through the system slowly and will do little to affect the hundreds of thousands who will wake up this morning with nothing to do, no money and no future.

It is critical the government acts now to tackle the scourge of youth unemployment by re-opening the Flexible Jobs Fund and offering companies substantial incentives for taking on unemployed young people.

If we are to say we believe in our youth, we must invest in them and not treat them as an after-thought as has happened with this government.

Wherefore art thou Labour?

I am totally convinced that if you called an election today and at the same time hog-tied David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith, laid them on a bed of fraudulent expense claims in a seedy brothel and then called every national newspaper, Labour would still find a way to lose the election!

Take yesterday for example. Labour had it made – Spelman had to return to the House of Commons and apologise because she got the forestry sale wrong. In the same day, Iain Duncan Smith was forced to back down about the housing benefit reduction for long-term unemployed.

Did Labour come out fighting and baying for blood? Of course not – first they sent in Mary Creagh to waffle on endlessly about how Labour were bigger and better tree-huggers than the Conservatives. By the time she had finished, half the elected members were cheerfully snoozing away and all you could hear in the chamber were gentle snores coming from one or two of the leading lights in the 1922 Committee.

Labour didn’t even get excited when Iain Duncan Smith presented his welfare reform bill to parliament – this is despite the fact that many will suffer. Clause 51, for example, contains proposals, as yet scarcely noticed, that seriously jeopardise the income of many disabled people. Consider a stroke victim, who may have paid national insurance for decades before incurring a severe impairment from which there is no prospect of recovery. If they have even a low-paid working spouse, the bill will cut their money off cold the moment that 12 months have passed.

According to forensic analysis by Tim Leunig, an economist at the London School of Economics who has recently been appointed to the leading liberal think tank Centre Forum, it could leave large families even in deeply unfashionable corners of the capital trying to scrape by on £3 per person each day. And the entire bill is underpinned by a recasting of the rules on indexation, which will steadily make the poor poorer. Instead of being pegged to the total cost of living, benefits will in future be pegged to the cost of shopping, thereby stripping the rising price of keeping a roof over one's head out of the general calculation.

But did the Labour benches howl, rant and scream? Nah – they sat there whimpering, like a dog with a cut paw. They looked and behaved in a way that suggested they felt impotent and in many respects they are. Ed Miliband has proven to be almost laughable at PMQs – a guaranteed butt for the jokes and sarcasm pouring from David Cameron’s drippingly wealthy lips. As for the rest of them? Well Ed Balls has been something of a non-event – many predicted fire and brimstone. What we have had so far is more akin to tepid and mediocre. Yvette Cooper, supposedly one of the key brains in the Shadow Cabinet and a possible future leadership candidate, has been conspicuous by her silence. Not that there has been much going on in the world for her to talk about – Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Iran Bahrain, and of course, Afghanistan.

Then of course there is Liam Byrne. You may know the name but not remember why – he is actually the shadow secretary for Work and Pensions. Now, this week they announced the unemployment figures and the statistics made for pretty unpleasant reading - 2.5m people unemployed, the number of people in full-time work down 5,000 on the previous year, 2.2m people economically inactive because they are on long-term sick leave and 15% of people work part-time do so because they can’t find full-time work.

If the overall statistics were bad, they were dreadful when it came to the 16 to 24 year olds – 965,000 are out of work, a rate of 20.5%.

Against this, Chris Grayling emphasised there had been an increase of 40,000 new job vacancies in the three months to January. What he didn’t tell the House was these figures include openings for those taken on temporarily to conduct the 2011 census. If you exclude these vacancies, the actual increase was a meagre 8,000.

Now I may have blinked, but I don’t recall Byrne savaging the Tories about these results. Oh sure, they grunted a little and made polite moans in the appropriate places, but very few Tories would have felt a need to quake in their boots.

If Labour is going to have the audacity to call themselves the Opposition, they need to do just that – oppose. This doesn’t mean languishing on the green leather of the House of Commons chamber dozing off. It means vociferously and actively standing against all legislation attacking working class people.

It demands they stand against the government when they want to squeeze the poor, whilst dishing out £2bn to multinational corporations to run the Community Payback scheme.

If Labour is going to have any chance of impacting on the Tories it needs to re-evaluate its entire approach. This will mean dropping the “Mr Nice Guy” image and becoming tougher and more willing to resist. A number of Labour activists are already active in anti-cuts groups, but this need to seep through the sytem to the party leadership. Labour must take a more vital role in the Coalition against the Cuts and the Right to Work movement.

Has Ed Miliband got what it takes to lead such a party? This morning I am not so sure.

Work placements - slavery by any other name

So now the government intends to encourage young people into work by offering them eight-week work placements.

According to Indus Delta (the newswire for the welfare to work industry), they state the new scheme:

“... will now allow young people to undertake work experience for up to eight weeks rather than current paltry two weeks. Under the existing regime, if you tried to do more, you ran the risk of having your benefits docked. The new initiative will be applicable for individuals between 18 and 21 who will be matched by Jobcentre Plus with employers looking for people to do work experience.”

I am pleased the new initiative excites staff at Inclusion, or CESI by its more popular name (for those not in the know, Inclusion run the Indus Delta website), but I fear I cannot build the same level of enthusiasm. To me, this is yet another scheme to take workless young people out of the unemployment statistics and sanitise levels of worklessness.

None of these schemes offer young people any kind of vocational training or any certainty they will be offered a permanent job on completion of their placement.
Now, let’s look at this more realistically. What do you call work where you are punished if you don’t attend, you don’t get paid, there is no security of tenure, the work traditionally tends to be menial, or burdensome, you are unable to join any company pension or health scheme and you have no in-company holiday entitlement?

Isn’t this another type of slave labour – with just a floral hue to make it sound better?

According to the Oxford Dictionary Online, ‘slavery’ means “condition of having to work very hard without proper remuneration or appreciation.” Now, if work placements don’t fit this definition of slavery, then what does?

The government need to tackle the whole issue of youth unemployment far more realistically, with initiatives to encourage jobless youths to access far more apprenticeships or training courses. Those wishing to remain in education should be encouraged to do so through the Educational Maintenance Allowance. Additionally, companies could be encouraged to take on younger recruits through payment of a dividend, in the same way long-term unemployed on New Deal programmes were attractive to employers through payments from Jobcentre Plus.

Whitewashing the statistics through miserable halfhearted gestures is not the answer.

Heading for the scrapheap: A generation ignored

Nearly one in five 18-year-old boys and one in six girls are not in employment, education or training (“NEET”) and earlier this month a count from the Department for Work and Pensions found 600,000 people under the age of 25 have never done a day’s work in their lives.

In 2003 in the UK, 12.1 per cent of those aged 20-24 came into the category classed as ‘early school leavers’. By 2008 this had risen to 17%. The increase in the NEET count amounted to 40%. The effect of Britain’s growing proportion of NEETs means that in 2008 there were more badly educated young people than in 22 other EU countries. In 2003, only ten countries had young people who were doing better.

In the past five years alone, 12 countries have overtaken Britain with improved work and training for young people. This leaves just four of Western Europe's 27 nations with larger proportions of NEETs than the UK.

Only a year ago the Association of Learning providers criticised the lack of provision for 16 and 17 year olds NEETs. Their main concern was that under-18s school-leavers who are currently unemployed are largely disregarded by the welfare to work system. In recent years dedicated pre-employment provision for this age group has been largely limited to the Entry to Employment (e2e) programme which targeted disaffected and disengaged youngsters. However this leaves a relatively large cohort of unemployed 16/17 year olds for whom no employment support mechanisms are in place.

Many ESF funded NEET programmes closed in December and the last of the E2e provisions will end in two years time. Very few new initiatives are being put forward to replace them, though later this year a new NEET initiative in London will be announced, although, of course, future learners will (in all probability) not have the advantage of the EMA allowance - thus making it far less attractive for potential learners..

LSIS has offered some funding through the Flexibility and Innovation Fund, but this is a more general funding source rather than a specific NEET targeted allocation. For its part, the government has argued the Work Programme will support NEET learners and help them find sustainable employment. However, there is now a huge body of evidence supporting the view that these learners require targeted, accessible and tailored programmes that recognise the chaotic lives these individuals face.

What is abundantly clear is that NEET learners require very different interventions from that of, for instance, an unemployed plasterer or local government worker. A one-size fits all provision such as the Work Programme is not the answer. Without investment in services reflecting the broad range of needs facing NEET young people, we will continue to see an escalating number failing to realise their full potential.

The previous Labour government failed to fully address the needs of NEETs and now the Tories, with their ‘Cuts! Cuts! Cuts!” mantra, seem even less likely to offer our youth a fair chance. This inactivity by our political masters will ultimately yield a generation where many will have little or no work experience, few qualifications and a plethora of psychological and emotional problems. It is an outrage we are ignoring their needs of todays youth and the government should be held to account now – before the damage becomes irrepairable.