Nick Clegg should be congratulated for doing the right thing by reviving the Future Jobs
Fund and the Young Person’s Guarantee, for that is what the Youth Contract is in all but name.
This is, of course, another U-turn. As Chris Bryant tweeted rather brutally after Clegg’s announcement, if the government wanted to save young people from the scrapheap, why did it put them there in the first place. It never made sense to abolish the Future Jobs Fund without putting anything in its place and ministers never sounded convinced when they said the Work Programme would deliver for young people.
It is to the eternal credit of Clegg and those around him that they realised a job subsidy was an essential intervention in a stagnant jobs market. This is not easy to stomach for those who believed the market would eventually provide the solutions — not least Iain Duncan Smith and Chris Grayling who until now have stubbornly stuck to the line that the Work Programme would deliver for young people.
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