No one denies that there is a crisis of youth unemployment. Statistics show that there are now around one million young people who cannot find work (see the graph above).
But as David Miliband
said to The Times last year, the Coalition Government did not “invent the problem of youth unemployment.” It started to become a serious issue under Labour from late 2005.
In Labour’s 13 years, a mountain of young British people joined the dole queue.
Figures show that youth unemployment has been stuck in the range of 0.8 million to 1+ million now for more than six years. This is well before the Great Recession, and the banking crash.
The reasons for this are difficult to fathom. Clearly, far too many youngsters have been on a conveyor belt to nowhere. It started in broken families, and carried on in failing schools, where
half a million children left primary school unable to read or write in the last 10 years. The result is a skills deficit.
Britain can’t afford this. 25 per cent of German companies now offer apprenticeships to young people. But in England it is just 10 per cent.
This has begun to change. The Government has increased the number of apprentices to record levels. But we are starting from a low base. In 2009, in Britain, there were something like
11 apprentices for every 1000 workers. But in Germany, it was 40.
In 2009 our young people were FOUR TIMES worse off, when it comes to apprenticeships, compared to Germans. When we consider that the Berlin wall fell only 20 years ago, this is deeply shocking: it shows just how uncompetitive Britain has become.
For years, Germany reaped the benefits of its skills policy - a culture that valued apprentices and gave prestige to vocational learning - and Germany built up its manufacturing and high-tech industry, while we lost out, not only during the last Government but during the 1990s as well.
The structural bulk of youth unemployment will take years to solve. But there are some measures we can bring in straight away for an immediate impact. That is why, for many months now, I have been pushing for the Government to use public procurement as a way of boosting apprenticeships.
Today, I am publishing a substantive and fully-costed proposal showing how to do this in practice. (See
HERE.)
My plan - if rolled out across Whitehall and the wider public sector - would create up to 120,000 extra apprenticeships at no cost to the Treasury. Estimates show that this would cut youth unemployment by approximately 7 per cent.
You can download my full proposal
HERE - or it follows below.
Some will be worried about opening Pandora’s box, and burdening yet more regulation on the private sector. My answer to this is simple. Let's ask Contractors to hire apprentices - but make it voluntary. No regulation. No red tape. No extra costs.
In fact, it is one of the Government’s best kept secrets that this is already been happening in the Department for Work and Pensions. It has been going on since July 2011 - under Iain Duncan-Smith and Chris Grayling - and it is working. In the DWP, 2,000 apprentices are already employed in the Department’s supply chain.
It is happening in local Government, too. Cllr Derrick Louis, at Conservative-run Essex County Council, has persuaded his Contractors and their Sub-contractors to hire more than 200 apprentices - AND he has saved more than £100 million pounds a year from his budgets.
If my proposal was implemented fully, it would compliment the Government’s plans for at least 24 University Technical Colleges, the Youth Contract, extra resources for English and Maths, and £19 million extra to create 19,000 new Higher Apprenticeships. It would go with the grain of reform - not against it.
In Harlow, apprenticeships have rocketed by 73 per cent - thanks to phase one of an apprentice revolution in Britain.
My hope is that this proposal could be part of phase two.
Public Procurement and Apprenticeships by Robert Halfon MP
p.s. I first wrote this article for Politics Home, you can see the original
HERE.
by Robert Halfon - www.roberthalfon.blogspot.com
