Kickstart scheme for youth employment fails to deliver

The Public Accounts Committee has said that the £1.9 billion ‘emergency intervention’ Kickstart scheme has supported far fewer young people than predicted.

Whilst supporting the Department for Work and Pensions’ ‘intention of supporting young people into work’, the committee says that the early delivery of the Kickstart scheme was ‘chaotic’ and the DWP ‘neglected to put in place basic management information that would be expected for a multi-billion-pound grant programme’.

DWP is forecasting that Kickstart will support far fewer young people than envisaged - 168,000 as opposed to the original prediction of 250,000 - and will cost £1.26 billion.

According to PAC, many young people who joined Universal Credit at the start of the pandemic have remained on the benefit, and DWP doesn’t know why these people have not moved into Kickstart jobs. In further criticism, the committee says DWP also does not actually know what employers are providing with the £1,500 employability support grants they get for each young person they take on through the scheme.

Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the committee, said: “There are very unfortunate similarities across government’s Covid response schemes: rushed implementation and too little track kept of whether a scheme was delivering what it promises – even given the unprecedented pressures at the start of the pandemic. In this case the department simply has no idea whether this scheme was worth the money, not least because it has little idea what was delivered for it.

“DWP set up a scheme with good intentions but with no proper way of measuring its success for young people seeking work. It enabled employers to spend money for placements with no method of recovery if the job did not last. Employers were frustrated by how hard it was to find suitable candidates for the jobs they created – and ultimately the scheme reached far fewer people than predicted.”