Kickstart scheme not delivering value for money

The National Audit Office has reported that Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s flagship Kickstart scheme may not be delivering value for money.

Sunak launched the Kickstart scheme on September last year, offering government-funded ‘high-quality’ job placements for 16- to 24-year-olds who are on universal credit and at risk of long-term unemployment.

Now, the public spending watchdog has highlighted concerns that youth unemployment policies are either insufficient or flawed and that there is only ‘limited assurance’ that the scheme was working as intended.

The report also found that there was relatively little early take-up for Kickstart due to successive lockdowns depressing demand for workers, so far the scheme has created 96,700 jobs rather than the targeted 250,000. When firms did start hiring, the NAO said, there was little monitoring by government to check that the jobs it funded were of good quality.

Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO, said: “At the start of the pandemic, DWP acted quickly to set up Kickstart to help young people into work when youth unemployment was predicted to rise significantly. However, DWP has limited assurance that Kickstart is having the positive impact intended. It does not know whether the jobs created are of high quality or whether they would have existed without the scheme. It could also do more to ensure the scheme is targeted at those who need it the most.”

The NAO’s assessment of Kickstart was accompanied by a separate but similarly critical report by a cross-party committee on youth employment, which stands at 11.7 per cent. The peers accused the government of allowing hundreds of thousands of young people to languish in unemployment when they could be learning new skills or serving apprenticeships.