Διαβάστε περισσότερα 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
