The government’s new “youth guarantee” will have “more opportunity” than the youth training scheme that ran through the 1980s, the work and pensions secretary has said.
Pat McFadden, who was moved to the DWP in prime minister Keir Starmer’s reshuffle three weeks ago with an expanded brief that includes skills, will lead on the new policy and wants to make the offer “more attractive” than what has come before.
He spoke about the promised youth guarantee after it was announced by chancellor Rachel Reeves at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool today.
Aimed to tackle spiralling levels of youth unemployment, Reeves said the initiative will involve every young person being “guaranteed either a place in college for those who want to continue their studies, or an apprenticeship to help them learn a trade vital to our plans to rebuild our country, or one to one support to help them find a job”.
She added: “But more than that, our guarantee means that any young person out of work, education or training for more than 18 months, will be given a paid work placement, real work, practical experience, new skills.”
Ahead of full detail in next month’s budget, the Treasury has revealed this new initiative will “build upon existing employment support and sector-based work academies currently being delivered by the Department for Work and Pensions”.
And it will include a “targeted backstop”, where “every eligible unemployed young person on Universal Credit for 18 months without earning or learning will be provided guaranteed paid work”.
Eligible young people who refuse the job opportunity will have their benefits docked, according to reports.
Sector experts have suggested the youth guarantee is a rebadged version of the youth training scheme (YTS) that was introduced under Margaret Thatcher’s government in 1983.
Backed with around £1 billion, the YTS offered paid work placements and training for hundreds of thousands of 16- to 17-year-olds to tackle youth unemployment. It was abolished in 1989 with critics arguing the placements were little more than a source of cheap labour with limited prospects of progression.
Asked whether the new youth guarantee will be another version of the YTS, McFadden said: “I hope the scheme that we are bringing in, sorry to keep returning to my word of the day, but there’s more opportunity built into it.
“I think we’ve got to make the offers and the options attractive for people. We want good work experience, good training, good skills, but it’s important as part of it to have a paid employment sort of backstop, to use a phrase from another day, as part of the system, and the reason for that is to avoid a situation where a young person just drifts from education into long term on benefits.
“The reality of this is there are families around the country of multi-generational unemployment, and we’re trying to break the pattern of something that can be a hard thing to do.”
He added: “I will say it’s about policy meets life, and again, the easy answer rubs up against sometimes very untidy circumstances. So I hope it’s a match of opportunity and responsibility.”
DWP taking on skills is ‘potentially exciting’
McFadden’s expanded brief at the DWP includes apprenticeships, adult further education, skills, training and careers, and the newly created agency Skills England.
Asked by FE Week for an insight into his plans for skills policy, McFadden said that while it is “early doors”, he mentioned how he wants “shorter courses” to become more available for employers.
He said: “The traditional first visit for a new secretary of state at DWP is to a job centre. They said, do you want to go to a job centre and I said, well, no, we’ve just taken on skills, I should go to an FE college.
“So I went to Waltham Forest FE College, where the job centre were already present. It’s quite interesting. They said to me, we come here because it’s easier to get to the students here at the FE college and asking them to commence […] there’s another debate there about making the job centre offer more flexible. I think this is potentially exciting.
“There’s a lot of debate on the apprenticeship levy and courses, the length of them and so on. You know, I hope we get to a position where we can offer shorter courses that face the employers and help them use the training opportunities in a way that benefits them.”
The government’s industrial strategy, published this summer, revealed that new courses will be funded through the reformed growth and skills levy from early next year. But no detail has since been released about what the courses will be.
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