Youth jobs scheme launched to address ‘lost generation’

Hambleton District Council’s cabinet has pledged £100,000 towards the new apprenticeship scheme - the first of its kind in the country - to support 18 to 24-year-olds in their first year of work.

The initiative will include a wage subsidy scheme - making Hambleton the only English local authority to provide a cash pot to pay 50 per cent of the wages of 15 young people for six months.

“Many young people leave school and have no hope of a job – and no future to look forward to,” said Coun Neville Huxtable, the leader of the local authority.

“Through this ground breaking scheme we are going to help some of them into employment – reducing the unemployment levels for this age group by around 25 per cent and at the same time helping to boost the local economy.

“This authority has banked a good deal of savings, partly through its shared services programme, and it is now time for us to look at ways of reinvesting some of those savings back into our communities.”

Council chiefs say they are working with local business leaders and Job Centre Plus to bring young people living in the Hambleton district who have been out of work for more than 26 weeks, back into employment in the district.

It is hoped the new scheme, announced this week, will initially bring up to 50 young people off the dole and into the workplace in Hambleton which has a considerably higher of youngsters claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance than neighbouring Richmondshire.

Nearly five per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds in the district are currently classed as unemployed - almost double the amount in Richmondshire.

However, the number is far below other parts of Yorkshire, such as Barnsley, where one in seven young people are on Jobseeker’s Allowance, with the town’s overall youth unemployment rate more than 30 per cent.

A spokeswoman for Hambleton District Council said it would operate alongside the apprentice schemes that are already run by the local authority – one of which has just recruited 10 new staff to the council’s waste and street scene department.

This week, it was revealed an estimated 100,000 people aged 18 to 24 are now classed as unemployed in Yorkshire.

Most worrying is a hardcore of more than 7,000 local youngsters who have been trapped on the dole for over a year.

That figure has soared from just 1,700 a year ago, although the Government insists changes in the way benefits are handed out means the true scale of the problem was previously being disguised.

Mark Goldstone, the head of policy at the Leeds, York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce, said a generation of long-term unemployed young people would have stark implications for the wider regional economy.