John Ennis: Reading’s young unemployed are paying the price of Osborne’s failure
With the latest figures for youth unemployment showing a 67% increase in Reading East over the last year, and a staggering 83% in Reading West, Lead Councillor for Children’s Services John Ennis says young people in Reading, and elsewhere, are paying the price for the failure of George Osborne’s economic policy.
Since January 2011 the number of people aged 18-24 who have been claiming unemployment benefit for 6 months nationally has more than doubled. The figure for Reading East constituency has gone up from 75 to 125, and that for Reading West from 90 to 165.
Cllr. Ennis says: “Reading is doing better than the national picture, but this is still a terrible waste of a generation. There is a global economic crisis, but in America, Germany and Japan unemployment is flat or falling, which shows this Tory/LibDem Government has got it wrong. They scrapped Labour’s Future Jobs Fund, which guaranteed young people six months’ work at the minimum wage, and all they have to offer them instead is compulsory unpaid work for big retailers, work with no reward and no future. George Osborne is cutting too far, too fast and is scarily stubborn with it.”
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