According to a new report, there is limited evidence that Rishi Sunak's 2 billion jobs programme for young people is working.
The National Audit Office NAO watchdog said the government has little assurance as to whether the Kickstart scheme, aimed at 16 to 24 year-olds, is having a positive effect or creating high quality jobs.
The government says 100,000 jobs have been created through the scheme, but it is not clear if these roles would have been created anyway, said the NAO.
The Kickstart scheme was created to create six-month work placements for young people who have been claiming benefits after a rise in unemployment last year due to the Pandemic.
At the beginning of the epidemic, the NAO warned that more could be done to make sure that jobs are targeted at those who need them the most. Gareth Davies, head of the National Audit Office, said: At the beginning of the epidemic, the Department for Work and Pensions quickly acted to set up Kickstart to help young people into work when youth unemployment was predicted to rise significantly. DWP has limited assurance that Kickstart is having the positive impact intended, according to Mr Davies. It is not known if the jobs created are of high quality or if they would have existed without the scheme. The NAO said that the labour market was reopened in ways that were not originally anticipated due to the following lock-downs.
The risk of government subsidising jobs that wouldn't have been created would have been increased, the NAO said.
The government had originally stated that it intended to get 250,000 young people on a Kickstart placement by the end of the year but fewer than 2,000 young people had started new roles through the scheme as of January 2021.
This summer, the DWP admitted that this target was unrealistic. There will be a total of 168,000 starts by the end of March 2022, it estimates.