Nick Pickles’s blog

The future jobs fund - no job, no refunds.

Yesterday Labour were back to their favourite pasttime - shouting about how many jobs the Government could create if only it had more tax pennies and pounds to play with. (110,000 apparently, just from a new bank tax. Although that is paying for a VAT cut on petrol too…)

So I was amazed to see this report (published in November 2010) which showed a staggering half of all Future Jobs Fund placements ended with the individual back on benefits.

Interestingly, there is a big step - after six months, 10 per cent were back on benefits. After seven months, that figure jumps to 50%. FJF jobs lasted six months, and what these figures make clear is how many of them were not real, value-adding jobs. Of the other half, I’d wager many were not careers and were still in publicly subsidised positions of some sort.

The Future Jobs Fund was not a way of creating jobs, it was an incredibly inefficient and expensive way of giving Labour MPs an easy statistic to put on their leaflets.

Anyone would think Gordon Brown and Ed Balls were creating short term, taxpayer-funded jobs to mask an underlying problem that in reality Labour had no clue how to solve, and had arguably made worse during their time in government. They could then take credit for the jobs they ‘created’ for political gain.

All on the public credit card.