By Vivienne Russell | 16 March 2012
Labour would tax bankers’ bonuses to fund a ‘job guarantee’ for unemployed young people, Ed Miliband has announced.
Speaking at the party’s youth conference in Warwick today, the Labour leader launched a new policy: the Real Jobs Guarantee. This would give a job to any person aged under 25 who had been out of work for more than a year.
Miliband said: ‘The first line of a Labour Budget would be a tax on bank bonuses to get jobs for our young people. To business, we say: we’ll pay the wages, if you provide the training. To young people: if you’re out of work for a year, we’ll guarantee you the opportunity to work.’
Labour estimates that the scheme would help at least 100,000 people who are currently unemployed. The party claims it would also offer better long-term job prospects than the Future Jobs Fund, which was used by the previous Labour government to tackle youth unemployment.
Miliband criticised the coalition government’s decision to scrap the Future Jobs Fund and said its response to the problem of youth joblessness was ‘inadequate’.
He added: ‘The number of young people looking for work for more than six months has doubled over the past year alone. And what is [the government’s] solution? A Work Programme that does not guarantee work. A jobs programme scheme that does not offer jobs.
‘Work experience of course has a role to play in helping people into work. But work experience is not the same as a real job. It cannot be the summit of our ambitions. There is only one solution to a jobs crisis: jobs.’
Figures published on Wednesday revealed that there were 1.04 million unemployed young people at the end of last year.
