It is hard to deny the assertion made by Jeremy Hunt and the Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride that there are plenty of opportunities for people who want to work, or at least for a good number of them.
If you want the long-term unemployed to take up jobs, you don’t offer them a little gentle encouragement: you send them on compulsory work placements
According to the Office for National Statistics, there were 898,000 unfilled vacancies across the UK economy between February and April – meaning there were 1.6 unemployed people for every vacancy. Not all these jobs will be suitable for everyone, of course: they may not be in the right places, or they may require qualifications which not all unemployed people have. But it has become a feature of the jobs market over the past few years that while we still have large numbers of people on out of work benefits we simultaneously have employers screaming out for recruits – and reporting that there are some jobs which Britons simply don’t want to do.
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