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Youth Unemployment

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate on youth unemployment. As I am sure all hon. Members know, youth unemployment is a huge problem that needs to be tackled. We should try to avoid playing politics on such an issue, but, sadly, the motion serves to make a party political point. The future jobs fund is currently part of the policy, but the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt) seems to think that it is the be-all and end-all, and a utopian solution to the problem of youth unemployment. He does not take into account the fact that it is part of an overall policy to tackle the huge problem of getting our young people into the labour market on a sustainable footing—I emphasise the word ““sustainable””. In proposing the motion, the Labour party is creating a smokescreen—it is a red herring—to disguise the many years of failure to tackle youth unemployment. One in five young people are out of work, nearly 1 million are unemployed, and 600,000 who left education under the previous Government are yet to find work. That record of abject failure and that legacy leave little room for the Labour party to lecture the Government who are trying to sort those problems out, having taken on the worst public finances in living memory. The future jobs fund was, I am sure, beneficial to some young people, but was it cost-effective and sustainable? Did it lead to permanent and sustainable employment for our young people? The evidence tells us that it did not.