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Youth Unemployment

That was not a straight answer to a simple question, which was why a DWP official confirmed the figures to the BBC yesterday and again this morning. The conclusion that the House can draw is a point that was made by the Office for Budget Responsibility—that there is not enough confidence that the Government have a plan in place to get people back to work. Indeed, the OBR has so much confidence in the Government's plan to get people back to work that it is forecasting a declining rate of employment for the rest of this Parliament. I do not claim that the future jobs funds was some kind of celestial design. I am sure there are aspects of it that could be improved. As my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Wavertree (Luciana Berger) mentioned a moment ago, it was labelled ““a good scheme”” by the Prime Minister on his trip to Liverpool. The evidence on which it was abolished was simply not there. In my constituency we have the highest youth unemployment in the country. The leaders of my jobcentre on Washwood Heath road have consistently said to me that the future jobs fund was one of the best programmes they have ever administered. Overwhelmingly, they say, the young people they send on the programme do not come back and join the dole queue. In their first months the Government rushed out some hasty research on its expense. This is what the Work and Pensions Committee had to say about that scribbled bit of analysis:"““A robust evaluation of the FJF has yet to be undertaken…insufficient information was available to allow the Department to make a decision to terminate the FJF if this decision was based on its relative cost-effectiveness.””" That is an extraordinary indictment of the Government's rationale. The report says that half of future jobs fund graduates get benefits at seven months, but that is because the programme ends at six months. The Government dispute the claim that the scheme created real jobs. I am not sure what Jaguar Land Rover would say about that and the places that it created on the future jobs fund, but surely the point is that when people do not have a job, any job is a good job.