Youth Obligation — House of Commons, 2018-10-26
Topic: Labor
Guy Thomas Opperman (Conservative, Centre-right): I congratulate the right hon. Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) on securing this debate. I have been asked to respond because the Minister for Employment sadly cannot be here Everyone on the Government Benches acknowledges that the right hon. Gentleman should be on the Opposition Front Bench, given his massive experience at the Department for Work and Pensions, and I welcome this opportunity both to debate this matter and to discuss in the more detail the subject of youth employment, which I think motivates every single Member of Parliament. We all want to improve the life chances of those whom we represent Nationally, the employment rate for 18 to 24-year-olds not in full-time education is 77%, which is up eight percentage points from 69% in 2010, and only 4.3% of young people aged 16 to 24 are unemployed or not in full-time education, which is a fall of 350,000 since 2010. Moreover, the national unemployment rate for this age group is 10.8%, as the right hon. Gentleman set out, which is a record low. It is worth commenting briefly that the decrease in youth unemployment is markedly better than that in the EU. When one compares our record low youth unemployment rate with that in Spain, at 34%, Italy, at 32%, France, at 21%, and Greece, at 39%, one realises that there has genuinely been a transformation, and one that I believe is among the driving successes of this Government. We all accept, I believe—I think the right hon. Gentleman accepts this—that the single biggest driver of social mobility and improvement of life chances is work, and the reality is that the universal credit programme and the Government reforms since 2010 are helping to create an employment revolution in this country, which is a massive improvement on the old system The statistics reflect a real achievement, but while this is worth celebrating we must not be complacent. That is why the Government have introduced a wide range of support for younger people. The principle of support for young people is well known to the right hon. Gentleman; it has dated back through many different Governments and generations and has been developed by the DWP in collaboration with a variety of organisations. We recognise that providing early targeted help at the start of a young person’s adult life helps them secure work and avoid unemployment. It is in that context that we introduced the youth obligation support programme The programme is for people aged 18 to 21 who make a new claim in a UC full service jobcentre. It is worth understanding how this programme came into being, and I will briefly outline that. We believe it takes the best types of support that previous individual evaluations have shown to work and puts them together in a single programme. The support starts with the intensive activity period. In 2016, the Department published an evaluation of this approach by the Institute for Employment Studies. It reported that it had an immediate positive behavioural effect on participants. It increased their confidence, and meant they engaged in a wider range of job search activities and made job applications to a higher standard. Earlier this year, the Work and Pensions Committee recognised in its youth employment report of 2018 that the Department had conducted a good quality trial of intensive activity. It said that the intensive activity element of the youth obligation should help young people overcome key barriers to work. We believe it encourages young people to think more broadly about their skills and job goals and identify any training they may need An example that applies to both the programme under discussion and the traditional model for younger people are sector-based work academies, which last for up to six weeks and include work experience, some bespoke training and a guaranteed interview for a real apprenticeship or other job. The Department published a quantitative impact assessment in 2016 that showed that young people who took part in this type of support spent on average considerably more days in employment and considerably fewer days on benefit than those who did not take part, and I know it had some success in the right hon. Gentleman’s constituency of East Ham, particularly utilising the work of his local colleges.