***CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY*** Lord Andrew Adonis, House of Lords debate on youth unemployment.

14 June 2012 In opening this debate on youth unemployment, I cant help observing that we have two and a half hours to debate one of the most critical issues facing the country, which is one tenth of the 25 hours the House has spent debating House of Lords reform in the last two months alone. Perhaps our priorities arent in quite the right order, or in the right proportion. My Lords, I doubt there many members of the House who deny the urgency of getting young people into jobs. A lost generation is in the making, which could scar Britain for decades to come. On this I agree with the Deputy Prime Minister, who described youth unemployment as a ticking time bomb for the economy and our society. I also agree with what he said needed to be done, which is to get every unemployed young person earning or learning again before long-term damage is done. The question for this debate is how far actions match words. However you look at it, the situation is dire. There are the 954,000 under 24 year olds who are not in employment, education or training. Most concerning of all are the 167,000 under 24s who have been unemployed claimants for more than six months, a number which has more than doubled since April of last year, and the 61,000 who have been claiming for more than 12 months, a number which has more than trebled in the last year. Young people have fared far worse than older people in this severe downturn. We can debate why, but for the young people affected, this isnt an academic debate but a personal catastrophe. A source not only, immediately, of low income, but also of low self-confidence, poor health, damaged relationships, and often extreme social marginalisation, all of which only further harms their job prospects and adds to the cost of putting it all right. I doubt your Lordships will dispute any of this. The question is what we do about it. Of the analysis I have read in recent months, I have been most impressed by the report of the commission on youth unemployment sponsored by Acevo the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations. The Acevo report highlights three priorities. First, young people need more job opportunities to be available, as soon as possible. Second, young people need better preparation and motivation for work. There needs to be new vision for what Acevo calls the forgotten half of young people who are not destined for university or a high quality apprenticeship post-16.

Third, unemployed young people need the support of a far more active welfare state to help them get into work and stay there. Let me take these three priorities in turn. First, more jobs. Almost everyone accepts that stronger incentives are needed for employers to recruit unemployed young people. The present government, after first scrapping the last governments Future Jobs Fund, have now recognised the need to do more; hence the new Youth Contract, offering 160,000 wage subsidies of just over 2,000 for each new private and voluntary sector job given to a long-term unemployed young person, over this year and the next two. The Youth Contract represents 53,000 work opportunities over the coming year, which in the face of 167,000 young people who have been unemployed claimants for more than 6 months, is not many, even if they are all created. However, 53,000 would be a start, so I would be grateful if the Minister could tell us precisely how many young people have so far this year been recruited by employers from the Work Programme, and what is the Governments projection for the rest of 2012? Could the Minister also tell us how what progress has been made in creating the 100,000 Work Experience places also promised for this year in the Youth Contract? I strongly support work experience placements, provided of course the young people are treated properly. But they are of short duration, as little as two or three weeks, and they are not of course a substitute for real jobs paying real wages. My party believes we need to go further than the Youth Contract. Hence our proposed Real Jobs Guarantee for under 25s who are long-term unemployed. For those who are out of work for more than a year there would be six month long paid employment, with the state providing wage subsidy for 25 hours of work and the employer covering the cost of 10 hours of training a week. I look forward to hearing from the Minister whether, if the Youth Contract doesnt rapidly reduce the number of long-term young unemployed, the Government will consider adopting the Real Jobs Guarantee, and the bankers bonus tax which makes it possible. I would urge the Prime Minister and Chancellor to do so sooner rather than later, if their concern about the young unemployed is more than crocodile tears. The second priority is to prepare young people better for work. Schools and FE colleges have a big job to do here. Even with the rise in school standards over recent years, four in ten 16 year-olds are still not getting five good GCSEs including English and maths, which is all-important in terms of their employability.

Alison Wolfs recent report on vocational education contains a startling fact: of the four in ten 16 year-olds who dont get five GCSEs including English and maths, only four per cent four per cent attain GCSE-level English and maths in any vocational education and training they do thereafter. As Professor Woolf rightly says, English and maths ought to be essential building blocks in whatever courses are taken by post-16 year-olds without basic skills, so urgent reform is needed here. Better still, of course, is for teenagers to get English, maths and a good general education while they are still at school. School standards are still not nearly high enough, particularly in the many hundreds of comprehensive schools where a majority of teenagers are still not leaving with essential GCSEs. This is the reason why the last government concentrated the academy programme on the lowest performing schools, to give them a big bazooka, as the Prime Minister might put it. I would urge the Government to focus new academies and free schools on disadvantaged areas, and to do more to support the recruitment of highly motivated teachers into such areas, by for example expanding more rapidly than planned the excellent Teach First programme. The education system also needs to promote technical disciplines better. This is why I strongly support Lord Bakers University Technical Colleges, which are academies for 14 to 19 year-olds each with a technical specialism ranging from engineering and construction to the digital media each of them sponsored and managed jointly by companies and by universities. Then there are apprenticeships. Everyone now talks the language of apprenticeships, which is a welcome change, and the Government cites very large numbers for new apprenticeship starts. However, scratch the surface, and most of the new apprentices turn out to be in their late 20s; all too many of them turn out to be existing employees, who have been renamed as apprentices because of the governments re-badging of the Train to Gain employer training scheme as an apprenticeship scheme; and a large number also turn out to be on short term training courses of less than six months duration. There is a real danger that apprenticeships are being dumbed down as fast as they are being created. Could I ask the minister how many 16 to 21 year olds were last year in apprenticeships lasting a year or more, which had both an employment and a college based component? And how many employers offered such apprenticeships? Perhaps he might tell me whether his own department is giving a lead and offering such apprenticeships? Does he by chance have one in his office? When I was a minister, I didnt, and looking back, I should have done. This isnt just tokenism. Unless government, central government and local government, gives a strong lead, it cant complain if the private sector doesnt follow. Public procurement has an important part to play here. For example, Kent county council now makes the creation of apprenticeships a procurement condition for contracts worth more

than 1m, with at least one apprenticeship required per 1m spent on labour. The first such contract was recently awarded to a company delivering highways maintenance which, as a result, will take on apprentices to cover at least three per cent of its jobs. The company, fittingly, is called Enterprise. Unless good quality apprenticeships for the under 21s, leading to good quality jobs, become far more numerous, we will never have secure pathway to employment for teenagers who are not on track to go to university. As the Acevo report puts it, If the route to university is a well signposted motorway, the route into work for other 16 to 18 year-olds is more like an unmarked field of landmines. In this respect I am attracted by Acevos suggestion that we set up an equivalent of UCAS for apprenticeships, with employers, national and local, large and small, advertising their apprenticeships through a single web-based system. The aim would be for this to become as near as possible a universal listing service. We also need more and better work experience for teenagers while still at school. And we need systematic mentoring of young people by young people, including those in work mentoring those out of work or on their way into it. Let me turn thirdly to the welfare system itself. The Minister is a respected champion of an active welfare system, one far more focused on helping people into work and mobilising organisations which are good at promoting this to do so instead of relying solely on a state bureaucracy. So can I ask him, is he satisfied that the current system is remotely active enough in helping young people into work and training, particularly those who are clearly in danger of long-term unemployment, or only casual employment, because they have few qualifications and virtually no work experience? The ministers flagship reform is the Work Programme, providing intensive and tailored support for the long-term unemployed. Let me just read out the description I have been given of young peoples eligibility to be included in the Work Programme: Some will be referred on a mandatory basis after 9 months of claiming JSA. Some will be referred on a mandatory basis after 3 months of claiming JSA if they are 18 and were NEET for 6 months prior to starting to claim JSA or if they claimed JSA for 22 of the past 24 months. Some can be referred at the discretion of Jobcentre Plus after 3 months if they fall of claiming if they fall into particular categories, eg if they are care leavers or homeless. Some will be referred immediately after their Work Capability assessment to determine whether or not they should be on ESA as opposed to JSA. Well, thats all clear then. More to the point, I doubt its at all clear to the young people who need this support, many of whom need it a good deal sooner than nine months after going on the dole, or after they have notched up 22 out of 24 months on the dole. I know that as part of the Youth Contract more support within Jobcentre Plus is being provided to the under 24s, but I would welcome the Ministers views as to how intensive support can be

given to young people who are clearly in danger of prolonged unemployment, before they have indeed been unemployed for the best part of a year. My lords, these are all vital issues, and I look forward to what other noble lords have to say. But could I end on as personal note. When I was 18, in 1981, I went to sign on at my local unemployment benefit office which was the former Camden Town workhouse. I had a few months to go before university, and in those days students could sign on. However, as I was filling in my form, the manager spotted me, came over and said, hey, you look as if you can read and write, how about a summer job working here? Within ten minutes I was on the other side of the counter and I spent that summer and all my university holidays thereafter working as a counter clerk in the Camden Town Unemployment Benefit Office. It was a life course in bureaucracy and all its glories. But more to the point, it was a life course in unemployment and all its evils. 1981 was the year unemployment went over 3 million. We had them queuing round the block to sign on young and old, many of them in tears as they told their life stories to anyone prepared to listen, while nothing much happened to help them. I hoped then that it would never happen again. But it is happening again, and it is our duty to do all in our power to bring it to an end as speedily as possible. ENDS