My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The Government’s Youth Contract has been branded a failure by their own advisers. It is also worth noting that the Work programme is finding work for only one in six long-term unemployed people. The House heard earlier, when the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions was called to answer an urgent question, about the other difficulties with the Work programme.
The scale of the problem we face in relation to youth unemployment is stark. I speak as the Member who represents the constituency with the highest rate of unemployment in the country. I meet many young people every day in my constituency who are themselves the children of people who found themselves unemployed in the last great recession in the 1980s. They are having the same problems that their parents’ generation had. Every day that a young person tries hard but fails to get a job increases their desperation and depression. I recently held a youth jobs fair in my constituency, along with my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) and my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey). More than 2,000 young people attended, and every one of them spoke of their desperation and their desire to find work and the difficulties of finding work in the current climate.
In those circumstances, knowing how much of a knock a young person’s life chances take when they find themselves unemployed for a long period, I think that it is right for the Government to consider taking much
bolder action. The fact that they have failed to do so shows that they have failed to meet the scale of the challenge of our times. I fear that we are storing up a much bigger problem for the future.
In the absence of such action, my point to the Minister is that we hope the new clause will stimulate more employment for young people and encourage employers to consider taking on a young person, and that it therefore helps to get to grips with some of the problems. It is a good proposal. It does not go as far as we would like and perhaps it will not have the impact that a compulsory jobs guarantee would have, but on its own terms it is a good proposal, so why not do it now? Nothing the Minister mentioned seemed to be an insurmountable problem. He said that the IT situation would be a little difficult, but we should not let IT difficulties at HMRC stop us getting to grips with the scourge of youth unemployment. He has failed to introduce the employment allowance as soon as we believe it should have been introduced. He also decided not to scrap the regional national insurance employers holiday, so letting it run for three years, yet he knows that it fell far short of the targets that were set for it at the beginning.
The Minister said that the problem with the April 2014 date is that the Government wanted to wait until real-time information was all online and working properly. However, I have interrogated others on this point, and it was apparently not impossible or too difficult for the Government to amend the IT situation so as to enable the employment allowance to be brought in earlier than April next year. I am afraid that the same point applies to the proposal on national insurance for under-21s. The Minister has said nothing that suggests that it should not be brought in as early as possible, April 2014 being the best date on offer.
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