Tag Archives: youth unemployment

29 July 2020 – the overnight press releases

  • PAC report on social care demands lessons are learned
  • Government continues to ignore bad deal economic warning
  • Government must do more to get young people into work

PAC report on social care demands lessons are learned

Commenting on a Public Accounts Committee report which condemns the “slow, inconsistent and at times negligent approach” to the social care sector during the Covid-19 pandemic, Liberal Democrat MP and member of the committee Sarah Olney said:

The coronavirus has left people worried about their future and mourning loved ones. While we have relied on frontline staff to protect us, the Government’s PPE shortages seriously let NHS and care workers down.

People deserve better. Ministers must read and act on this report before it is too late to prepare for a second wave. That means rapidly upscaling the strategy to test, trace and isolate every case of coronavirus to keep people safe and prevent new surges.

To improve public confidence, the Prime Minister must set out a timetable for the independent inquiry into the Government’s actions. With that, we can ensure the same mistakes never happen again.

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What European liberals have achieved over the past five years – the economy

Given how little coverage there has been in the British media of the work of the European Parliament, it comes as no surprise that few voters know what it does. Luckily, the ALDE Group in the Parliament have produced a guide to their achievements since the last European election in 2014, and I’m going to take the opportunity to highlight some of them today.

More stable financial markets

Scandals around the manipulation of the LIBOR and foreign exchange benchmarks, as well as the alleged manipulation of other indices, has highlighted the importance of benchmarks and their vulnerabilities. ALDE led negotiations …

Posted in Europe / International and News | Also tagged , , , and | 28 Comments

Opinion: Beware false promises on apprenticeships

At the Conservative Party Conference George Osborne made the startling announcement that there was to be 3 million new apprentices. Just like that.

At first this seemed to be astonishing,  however” informed sources” tell me it is 3 million over the whole 2015 – 2020 period, in other words the story was being “spun”.

I served a traditional apprenticeship and found that eventually lead me indirectly to a higher degree in a Russell Group University, so apprenticeships are something I take continuing interest in.

With this I am inclined to ask the question, how many of these apprenticeship positions are actually new jobs as opposed to employers re branding pre-existing or extrapolated jobs as apprentices?

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged and | 8 Comments

Clegg acts to ensure opportunities for all young people

Nick Clegg is spending today announcing new initiatives to help young people with their career choices by improving career advice in schools, allowing job centre plus to give advice to 16 and 17 year olds and to improve opportunities for work experience.  There will be a UCAS style “one-stop shop” to help those young people.

From today’s Independent:

Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, will pledge to “end the snobbery surrounding vocational education” that limits the prospects of those who do not go to university, and promise them “an equal shot” by helping them to make the right choice after taking

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EU’s Youth Guarantee to end “social emergency” of youth unemployment

Recent economic announcements have been a true rollercoaster ride, with unemployment figures falling to one of the lowest levels, but then national output also falling. This disconnect between unemployment and GDP is still confusing economist, but the real worry is that youth unemployment is doing as expected, if not exceeding expectations. Youth unemployment in the UK now stands at just under 1 million, with over 1 in 5 young people now out of work. This has recently risen to the highest level since 2011.

Across the EU this picture does not improve with youth unemployment standing at 23.7% which equates …

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PMQs: The Chief Whip’s brain is missing*

*Conservative Chief Whip, that is.

Does Andrew Mitchell have some embarrassing photos of David Cameron? Or is there some disaster coming up, known only to the Prime Minister, for which he is conserving the Chief Whip for dumping overboard at an expedient moment as “cover”?

There has to be some reason that the PM preserves in post a man responsible for one of the longest public aftermaths ever for an intemperate outburst.

Posted in PMQs | Also tagged , , and | 14 Comments

Opinion: guaranteed employment for young people

This is part two of a two-part post regarding policies to tackle youth unemployment – part one is here.

Welcome as the youth contract initiatives have been, I do not believe that they are yet comprehensive enough to adequately address what has been and remains a long-term endemic problem with youth employment in the UK.

For 16-24 year olds not in education, training or employment, we ultimately need to be able to offer a guarantee of paid work within a structured training program, albeit at minimum wage, even if this is in the public sector. The jobs and training would …

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Opinion: tax and benefit reform to help tackle youth unemployment

In a two-part investigation, Joe Bourke looks at youth unemployment. Sunday’s part two will have details of policies designed to provide guaranteed employment for 16-24 year-olds. In part one, we discuss changes to the tax system that would make such policies affordable.

If the 2012 budget sees the personal allowance increased to £10,000 we will have achieved a key plank of the 2010 manifesto and provided some welcome relief to the squeeze on incomes that has come not least from the increase in VAT to 20%.

Whether the increase in the personal allowance is achieved in this budget or subsequently, we will soon need to …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , and | 8 Comments

Nick Clegg launches Youth Contract for unemployed young people

More than a million young people, aged 16 to 24, are unemployed. That does not include students. Every single person included in that number is not in employment, not in education, and not in training either – the so-called NEETs.

That is a shocking figure, and as well as having a profound impact on the lives of each of those young people, it also affects the rest of us.

As Nick Clegg says, “Sitting at home with nothing to do when you’re so young can knock the stuffing out of you for years. It is a tragedy for the young people involved …

Posted in News | 3 Comments

Opinion: troubling times in the jobs market

Despite uncertainty over the statistics (don’t worry, this isn’t a post about p-values and standard deviations), we can say with some confidence (say, 95%) that the UK jobs market remains in a volatile state with many people out of work or underemployed. With public sector jobs being shed rapidly as a result of austerity measures, and the private sector unable or unwilling to create more jobs than it sheds due to falling demand (going against Chancellor George Osborne’s  expectations), the net result is a devastating lack of work for millions of people, …

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PMQs: Ding-dong over youth unemployment

The focus of the Cameron v Miliband this week exchange was the new figure of one million unemployed young people. It started with a battle between the government’s Work Programme versus Labour’s Future Jobs Fund. Miliband blamed the Work Programme for increasing Youth Unemployment:

…in June, when the Work programme was introduced, 85,000 young people had been unemployed for more than six months; now, there are 133,000—a massive increase since he introduced the Work programme.

But Cameron countered with figures saying that:

The Work programme is helping 50% more people than the future jobs fund: it will help 120,000 young people this year,

Posted in PMQs | Also tagged and | 2 Comments

DPMQs: Clegg shows his passion on a range of issues

As usual, questions to the Deputy Prime Minister this week covered a large variety of subjects. Nick Clegg was on passionate form on several issues.

Harriet Harman asked if he would “admit that he urgently needs to take further action to help the young unemployed?”. Refreshingly, Nick Clegg did admit this, adding:

…it would be a real dereliction of duty if we did not do more to try to make sure that young people are given a real pathway into training, further and higher education or the labour market. As the right hon. and learned Lady will know, youth unemployment has increased

Posted in Parliament | Also tagged , and | 26 Comments
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