Nick Clegg reveals £1 billion fund to tackle youth unemployment

Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, has announced a £1 billion plan to provide training schemes, apprenticeships and work placements to help young people have better employment opportunities in future.

The £1 million fund will be spent over three years and it will provide job opportunities for young people through a number of subsidies, apprenticeships and work experience placements to hundreds of thousands unemployed people.

Some 160,000 work places will be provided by giving £2,275 to any private sector business willing to hire an unemployed person aged 18 to 24 years old as the full scale of the project is expected to get 500, 000 people back into employment.

Mr Clegg said: “We won’t allow the children brought up in the boom to bear the brunt of the bust. The next generation must not pay the price for my generation’s mistakes. So the coalition government won’t sit on our hands and let a generation fall behind.”

With record number of youth unemployment the government is determined to do everything it can to help young people get a job across every sector of the economy.

In a speech in Leeds later today, Mr Clegg said: “The aim of the youth contract is to get every unemployed young person working or learning again before long-term damage is done. Youth unemployment is an economic waste and a slow-burn social disaster.

“If people are out of work when they’re young, they bear the scars for decades. If they have a false start, they might not ever fully catch up. These are tomorrow’s mothers, fathers and taxpayers. If they end up falling behind, our whole society pays the price.”- The Deputy Prime Minister added.

The new programme is going to start next April. Its main aims will be to get young people into a range of employment sectors – from retail and construction to the green economy.

For example, up to 410,000 work and training placements will be created in England, Wales and Scotland by providing employers with wage incentives equivalent to half of the youth national minimum wage which will create more jobs and boost employment.

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