Teenagers to be given jobs funded by the taxpayer

Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, will today announce a £1 billion scheme to pay firms more than £2,000 for each young unemployed person they hire.

The payment — effectively a taxpayer-funded bribe for companies — is designed to get more than 400,000 young people into work.

The scheme, which has hallmarks of the Thatcherite Youth Training Scheme of the 1980s, will be funded by freezing tax credits for up to three years, hitting millions of workers earning up to £28,000.

Yesterday it emerged that the number of so-called Neets — young people not in education, employment, or training — has risen to 1.163 million. This represents an increase of 12 per cent over the past year.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/8914306/Teenagers-to-be-given-jobs-funded-by-the-taxpayer.html

BBC link : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-15878796

that the last Labour government ran and that coalition scrapped in its first year in power.

Just like YTS in the 1980s I suspect it will just end up as subisiding employers to take on workers that they would have employed any way. It will also probably just shift the burden of unemployment as older workers get the push so they can be replaced with government funded kids. Worth noting that it is being financed by freezing tax credits so some people who are already working but struggling financially may well be worse off as a result of the initiative. It wont be adding any new cash to the demand side of the economy. Basically just another piece of corporate dole like the recent housing initiative which was ostensibly to help FTB but in reality was a subsidy to builders and banks.