Almost a million young people are sitting at home not in work, study or training, and the best Rachel Reeves can come up with is a half-arsed scheme that looks like it was scribbled on the back of a fag packet in the back of a cab.

Resentment not Productivity

Her big idea? Force kids into jobs they probably don’t want, while the Government still picks up the wage bill. That’s not a jobs plan, that’s window dressing. It won’t give youngsters the skills they need, it’ll just dump them on employers who never asked for them, and the only thing that grows out of that is resentment, not productivity

And talk about cart before the horse, this thing’s been announced before businesses have even been consulted, let alone signed up. How’s that meant to work? It’s not a policy, it’s a press release designed to grab a headline and buy the Chancellor a few brownie points.

Square Pegs

I’ve been banging on about this for 20 years: if you want young people in work, give employers the backing to hire the ones who actually want the job and who fit the business. That way you’ve got round pegs in round holes, not the Government trying to hammer square ones in where they don’t belong.

But politicians never learn. They don’t understand business, they don’t understand skills, and they don’t understand young people. They just want to sweep a million embarrassing statistics off their books and hope no one notices.

Headline Grabbing Nonsense

Until they start listening to people who’ve actually built companies and created jobs, schemes like this will stay what they are, half-arsed, headline-grabbing nonsense dreamt up by a desperate Government.