It’s time to end job centres for the under-25s

The facts are stark. Young people have it much harder than their parents did. Over one million 16-24 year-olds are out of work and in no form of education or training; nearly two-thirds of these have never had a job. The situation for young Londoners is even worse: one-in-four young Londoners are unemployed, compared to one-in-five of their English peers.

Our back-to-work infrastructure is clunky, inflexible and unable to respond to the real needs of young people. It is time to start again, by ending job centres for the under-25s.

With half of young people reporting that job centre services do not understand their personal circumstances, we have to accept that the experiment of merging benefits processing and preparation for work has been a failure, and it has failed the young the worst. It is time for us to separate the necessary work of processing benefits from the much more difficult task of preparing and guiding young people into work – and helping them to stay there.

This is work that Jobcentre Plus advisers are currently untrained to carry out. They are currently rewarded for achieving ‘job outcomes’, not long term careers. They are pushed to see too many claimants – each adviser manages on average 135 clients, making it impossible for them to provide the tailored one-to-one support that young people need. And they are told to focus on sanctions, not on supporting young people into work for the first time, and on supporting them to stay in work when the going gets tough. The result – that we look at a young person, and see not a potential contributor to the society and economy, but a potential benefit scrounger.

We have to accept that young people will not lead the same lives as their parents. To succeed, they will need to be flexible and to see change as exciting, not scary. This flexibility is the very thing that job centres cannot provide.

A new approach would take the theory of the government’s Work Programme and actually apply it. The Work Programme promises flexibility, allowing talented niche organisations to develop their work with unemployed people. It promises local solutions to local problems, with tailored solutions to the situation in different areas. And it promises results – giving skills and long-term support to the long-term unemployed

The reality is different. The payment system requires contractors to have deep pockets to pay up-front costs, pushing smaller, more flexible organisations out of the programme. As a result, the same large organisations have ended up running the Work Programme throughout the country, producing national solutions to local problems. They have prioritised people who are nearest to employment and the results have been clear – in some areas, less than 5% of young people who signed up to the programme got a job at the end of it.

Our young people deserve better than the national job centres and Work Programme can offer. Rather than forcing young people to perform short course after short course, churning in and out of low-paid, low-skill jobs, the arts, sports and the creative and digital industries should entice young people into activities which develop their work skills without them even knowing it.

There should be no barriers to any organisation with a track record of getting young people into employment from joining the work of rebuilding our nation’s young potential. Local authorities should coordinate the activity on the ground and should be held to account for their results – unlike the secrecy which surrounds Work Programme outcomes. Programmes for young people should be designed by young people, coordinated by teams which understand the needs of young people in their area. This would be a system that we could be proud of – and it would be a system which would work.

Unemployment has local causes, and requires local solutions, which a one-size-fits-all national programme can never provide. We need to separate benefits processing from our approach to getting young people into work for life. This system needs fixing now if our young people are not to be the first into the recession and the last out. If we duck this challenge, when historians come to assess our generation’s politicians, youth unemployment will be our biggest mark of shame.

David Lammy is the Labour MP for Tottenham