Tuesday 24th January 2012 | 12:18

David Miliband: Youth have been hit disproportionately by the recession

By James Dwyer

Young people across the UK have been hardest hit by the impact of the recession on the labour market, David Miliband has said.

Speaking at a Jobs Summit organised by The RSA, Mr Miliband warned that there was a "serious problem" of youth unemployment, which he said could lead to "long-term scars".

"There is a very, very serious problem. There are 250,000 young people who have been unemployed for more than a year. There are one million young people under the sage of 25 who are unemployed. Some of them are graduates who are in short-term unemployment. There are 1.4m under-25s who are not in employment, education or training – so-called NEETS. That is a state that leads to quite long-term scars.

"This problem started before the recession. The present government did not invent this problem, but it got worse on their watch. The Prime Minister likes to quite the first half of that and not the second."

Issues

The former Foreign Secretary said that there were, in his opinion, three sets of issues that needed to be addressed.

"There are three sets of issues that we need to look at. The first is about preparation and motivation of young people for the world or work, especially for those who are not university bound. The notion of their preparation and skills, the incentives for skills as a motivation… we need to look for new ideas and responses to the current problem.

"Secondly, the clarity and quality of the offer for the non-university bound. I have compared the scene [of those who do no go to university] to a minefield, and as young people walk across this minefield their limbs are blown off because the understand, advice and quality of options is just not good enough.

"The third area where I think we need to do more work is the intensity and effectiveness of the remedial help given to young people once they are unemployed. In crude terms, we start late and don’t do it in sufficient quality or quantity. Our remedial help is a problem. The current Government for example have a Work Programme which has some important and useful elements but will only affect one in ten on the people I have mentioned today. The remedial help is not of a sufficient quality."

Horizons

He added that the idea of inter-generational unemployment - where households have no members in work and have not done so for at least two generations - was a "bit of a myth" and warned of a "horizon issue" for young people not going to university.

"There is a tiny percentage of households have no occupants who work across two generations. There is a more generic question – there is an issue of hopeless communities, where worklessness is perceived to be the issue.

"The biggest change is that the labour market should have expanded in the sense of the geographical labour market has. Transport is a massively bigger issue than people give it credit for. There is a horizon issue for the non-university bound. That is where the knowledge of the labour market creates a sense of hopelessness and I think that is a bigger issue."