The Government's new Youth Contract: what do you think?

[HelenMumsnet]

Hello.

You may have seen/heard that Nick Clegg has announced today a £1billion Youth Contract to tackle youth unemployment.

The Youth Contract includes, among other things, subsidised work and training placements, and a programme to help the most disengaged 16 and 17-year-olds get back to school or college, onto an apprenticeship or into a job with training. You can read more about it here.

The Cabinet Office has just been in touch with us at MNHQ to ask us what Mumsnetters think about these plans. So we've said we'll start a thread to find out.

Please do tell!

I would like to see it targetted at smaller companies who will train people in skills but who maybe aren't sure if they can afford to take someone on but might be able to expand by doing so. Not Tesco and the like who can afford to employ people on normal terms to stack shelves. That's just wrong, wrong.

Having looked into this a bit closer it's almost as if the govt has thought - rioting youngsters costs the country money. What we're going to do is chuck some money at the problem to keep them off the streets for six months - from April. This means through the Summer Holiday Riot Season. Call me a cynic.

They've just done some sums but the outcomes will be a temporary blip and keep some kids off the streets in the Summer before the next election.

My guess is that next summer you'll have hundreds of thousands of ex-public sector workers whose shared ownership keyworker ripoff flats will be repossessed, leaving them on the streets with plenty of time for rioting.

I might just join them. Stop tinkering about the edges, we need radical reform - not of the poor unemployed - but reform and control of the big greedy ripoff businesses who feed off their desperation.

Leaving school at 15 and starting work on a yop/yts scheme in the middle 70's I have an inkling how resentful these kids are going to be.
My 'Training' involved 60 or so hours a week behind a Woolco shop counter for 27 quid a week.
These schemes will only ever benefit the employers some of them opening up new companies using this cheap naive labour to fill their pockets.
The grey 70's just returned I feel sorry for any school leavers out there today.

absolutely betel! we need to be diversifying backwards, forwards and sideways to create more sustainable business', new jobs, trades etc etc not creating even more monolithic-ness in the economy (shelf stacking ).

we need to get creative fgs.

i was thinking as well, rather cynically, that it's all about forcing young people wth ability and potential who've been raised and schooled with the notion that if you work hard at school and do well you can more options in your life and work etc forget their uppity ideas and be willing to go and do the shit work for minimum wage for the rest of their lives. that maybe it's about breaking them and deliberately crushing their aspirations and ambition because our economy and jobs market will provide nothing to match them

i hope that is just cynicism gone mad but i fear it might not be. this is about crushing young people and preparing the next generation to stack shelves and answer phones in call centres for minimum wage and no employee rights for the rest of their lives no matter what their abilities or qualifications how about getting on with creating jobs and giving real hope instead?

i think basically currently we are seeing the absolute DEATH of social mobility. there is not much 'hope' in that.

I wonder if Wibbly has particular types of firm in mind when making her suggestions? We run a small business employing 30 people (fair enough, 30 people isn't many in the grand scheme of things, but every little helps), and I'm afraid that her suggestions would make things extremely difficult for us. We run on very tight profit margins - sales bring in enough money to pay all the expenses of the business and pay everyone's salaries, but there certainly isn't extra sloshing around in the pot. If we make someone redundant, its becasuse we've lost clients, and we certainly couldn't afford to pay extra taxes because we've lost clients.

Hiring new people is a massive stress - because money is tight, we only hire when we can't manage the amount of work with the staff we have. We have to pay to advertise, pay recruitment firms, and staff who are already busy have to squeeze the time to select and interview people into their day. We have real difficulties finding British people with the appropriate language skills to do the job. (We've been joking lately about heading down to the youth protests in Madrid and recruiting people from there, on the grounds that some of them might be able to speak more than one language.) Hiring anyone involves about a 6 week period when they aren't particularly useful to the business - and during which time, they're taking up another staff members' time to support them. We have taken a new graduate for the last couple of years, but they do need a lot of extra time put in to support and mentor them, and that comes at a cost to the business. I'd like to do more to give young people work experience, but it actively costs us money to do it.

I think Adamschic's idea that this should be targetted at small businesses rather than Tescos etc is in some ways good idea, but I'm afraid it would need a lot of money (to cover the costs for the company of looking after the young people, planning an appropriate programme for them in advance, etc.)

There's nothing wrong with shelf-stacking or working in a factory. These jobs can be done with pride. The bit that's wrong is the way in which employers treat their staff. There are very few companies now that are concerned about their employees well-being. This is what needs to change. If our young people are going to work for £6.25 an hour, employers can at least value them and treat them well so that they actually want to turn up.

Rowntree, one of our fathers of social welfare, set up a business offering fair pay and fair conditions to its workers, employing 14,000 people on favourable terms. Nestle bought it in 1988 leaving behind misery and failure.

The government has to be more radical than this and force better practices from big business. Most people want to work, but most people don't want to be miserable either.

I agree with Gretelsmum that the amount offered isn't enough for small businesses anyway, but small business should not have to run so close to the edge all the time. They are squeezed out by the powerful companies and it has to stop. Business rate should be reduced, favourably for small businesses, for a start.

Nick Clegg did the youth contract to get the figures below a million youngsters unemployed. Bosses will benefit. The young have lost faith

realhousewife one of the mums i worked with once brought her eleven year old daughter into the sex chatline office i used to work in because her childcare fell through. Does Camoron really think everyone works at a lovely oak desk typing or doing data entry?

I'm not sure that we as a company are necessarily being squeezed out by the big companies - it's generally a more complex relationship than that. The 'squeezing out' of local shops, for example, can be very visible, but I suspect there are a lot of other UK companies like us that supply the large companies, but which go unnoticed. Big multinational companies are our customers, so we're screwed without them. Some of our competitors are big companies too, some are probably not much larger than we are, or maybe smaller. We compete against the big companies by being better, quicker and more specialised. There was an interesting article in this week's Economist that said that one of the problems that small business in the UK has is that there aren't enough large businesses to supply and sell to, in contrast to Germany.

Our constant concern is over keeping and hiring staff who have the specialist skills we need. It seems tragic that at one and the same time there are young people finding themselves 'unemployable', and we are scratching around desperately to find people who can do our jobs. I think that one of the problems is that the skills people need nowadays are less predictable, and more of them are personal rather than mechanical skills. We need more fluent Mandarin and Cantonese speakers with real sales ability and good technical skills, for example, and these aren't things that it's all that easy to teach on an NVQ or similar.

amicissima - yes there are lots of people at tesco grateful for their jobs but they are jobs as in the 'real' jobs i meant as in jobs rather than short training placements that offer no 'job' at the end of it. you see the difference no?

cheap labour that doesn't even equal a job is not like doing low paid basic jobs to get by whilst you're young as we/many of us did. there is a distinct difference. the kids can't get those jobs that we luckily got and got us by because there aren't any. and there will be even less if the likes of tesco's are getting their shelves stacked by kids without a proper salary and zero employee rights.

you might need to rethink your ideas of lucky and gratitude. your dd was lucky to get a minimum wage job in the current climate. those without a degree going for the same minimum wage job didn't stand a chance presumably given the employers could pick from graduates.

Grendelsmum, the difference between Germany and us, is that German businesses are not run by shareholders and therefore do not have to provide profitable returns on a quarterly or annual basis. German businesses are able to commit to long term planning sometimes over 10 or 20 years because they are only accountable to themselves and their employees. I'm not an expert - there was a programme about this on radio 4 about the pencil companies - Staedtler, Stabilo etc.

ooo here it is - www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13019777

But Betelgeuse - of course you are right, but your posts assume the govt actually wants to make a long-term positive difference to either the kids on these schemes or the economy. Sadly, neither is true - this new plan exists only to enrich companies like Tesco even further, at taxpayers' expense, and to fiddle the youth employment figures. Plus the large-scale availability of cheap labour via these schemes should proably help to keep wage levels down too - great for the Tories' rich backers. Not so good for the ordinary people doing the jobs, obviously.

Clearly, as there is a mismatch between skills needed by employers like GrendelsMum and those offered by young people in the UK, young people need to be trained to meet those needs, either by the companies concerned (with taxpayer support if need be) or by our education system prior to employment.

Instead, the govt favours reducing our native skills base still further, by cutting higher education budgets, whilst relying (implicitly, if not admitting as much) on importing the skilled workers we need while UK workers remain unemployed. Or on moving all UK-based manufacturing abroad, to areas with cheaper and more highly-skilled workforces. Neither of which is good for the UK economy and UK benefits' bills, long-term.

Absolutely no joined-up thinking going on here.

It's the bloody languages that are such a problem. We've given up even hoping that British job applicants will actually be able to speak a foreign language fluently. We're now just hoping that they can brush up rusty A-level German and so on enough to write an email which will not utterly disgrace the company. Trying to find someone who can go into a company in another European company and sell to them is like hens' teeth. It's the feeling that they could have studied this at school or University and didn't which is so frustrating.

And English spelling, and grammar, and being able to construct a polite email or letter in appropriately formal language. Again, they could have learnt most of this in school, and didn't.

Having said all that, we do have a couple of young graduates who have many many excellent qualities, are (when well managed) very hard working, and are intelligent and quick to learn. One of them recently finished her first successful project, and we took the team out for cocktails to celebrate. They do have real potential - it's just that they need quite a bit more handholding to get there, and sometimes the hidden costs of training and support mean its more cost efficient to hire someone with those extra 5 years or so more experience.

it's 4 year thinking isn't it? again and again. all scheming their next spin bollocks election campaign while all around rome burns.

grendel my sister is fluent in french and german, has worked doing legal translations and in various specialised industries so extremely skilled language wise and very at ease with dealing with technical language etc. she's also looking for a career change after leaving a very big company to go out on her own free lancing for a while. mid 40's, highly experienced, has worked in other european capitals and very, very good with people. can i send her to you?

because weirdly those who do have these skills find it very hard to find work that makes use of them here in england. easy when they are living overseas but she has struggled to find anything of the same level of skill use as she had in paris.

sorry - random tangent.

and yes it is utter madness in a climate where we don't have enough unskilled labour to go round to be cutting HE budgets and discouraging most young people from going into HE. maybe they should consider ways to encourage HE in particular subjects/skill areas and incentivise kids to go into them and get industry on side too in playing it's part in contributing towards the training of the labour it will use whether that be through financial contributions, sponsorship or providing high quality training placements for students.