12. What support he plans to provide to young people who leave the Work programme without a job. (104213)

The Work programme will help and is helping a significant number of people into lasting work. We are trialling two approaches to supporting the very long-term unemployed. Those trials will inform the development of a national programme of support from the summer of 2013 for those leaving the Work programme who still need to find employment and need further help.

Young people deserve the offer of a real job if they are out of work long term. Why does not the Minister put in place Labour’s real jobs guarantee to ensure that young people have the opportunity of real jobs with training and time to search for a job, instead of dropping them like a stone?

We have to remember that the funding that underlies Labour party policy has already been announced for, I believe, nine different purposes of late. The programmes that we have put in place to help young people are much more cost-effective than the previous Government’s programmes, and much more affordable at a time when, as the right hon. Member for Birmingham, Hodge Hill (Mr Byrne) reminded us, there is no money left, and they are making a real difference today.

Is not the best way to help these young people the investment in the hundreds of thousands of apprenticeships that give young people the skills they need?

I completely agree. My hon. Friend has done a first-rate job in promoting apprenticeships in his constituency and in Parliament. The apprenticeship dimension to the youth contract will be an important part of getting young people into work. This is a much better way forward to create long-term career opportunities for young people than the short-term placements out of the private sector that were the hallmark of the previous Government.

Will the Minister share his concerns with the House about the rising level of long-term unemployment among London’s black youth, now three times the level of their white peers? Why is it that in Tottenham, 87% of Haringey’s young residents are not entitled to the wage incentive scheme under the youth contract? This is a real concern.

The only young unemployed people in Haringey not entitled to access funding under the youth contract are those who have not been out of work for very long. I genuinely share the hon. Gentleman’s concerns about young black unemployment, and that is one reason why we have created for Jobcentre Plus the flexible support fund, which enables our local offices to target support, as it is indeed doing in Haringey, at organisations such as the Tottenham Hotspur Foundation, which is working with young black people. The figures that the Labour party keeps putting forward about long-term youth unemployment are completely distorted by the fact that it used to hide people in the training allowance, which did not show up in the figures, and we no longer do that.