Westminster blog

Iain Duncan Smith was once more on the attack this morning against critics of the government’s work experience scheme, under which young people are told to sign up to a four-week placement at one of a range of businesses or lose their benefits.

The scheme has been controversial for two reasons. One is that it meant young people who were claiming benefits while looking for a job were not able to do work experience in their own chosen field; instead they had to go on a government-mandated scheme at a company such as Boots, McDonald’s, Argos, Tesco or Primark. The second is it meant some of the countries’ biggest companies profiting from free labour, which is why one activist referred to it this morning as “slavery”.

Writing in the Daily Mail, the work and pensions secretary has dismissed such criticisms however, saying:

Armed with an unjustified sense of superiority and sporting an intellectual sneer, we find a commentating elite which seems determined to belittle and downgrade any opportunity for young people that doesn’t fit their pre-conceived notion of a ‘worthwhile job’.

But now Tesco, one of the companies most heavily criticised for capitalising on free labour, has slightly pulled out the rug from under ministers’ feet, calling for them to drop the threat to remove benefits from those who don’t participate – the part that makes it effectively compulsory.

Iain Duncan Smith is not going to like that, and he is unlikely to accept it: the threat of benefits removal is the main incentive to get people to sign up.

Interestingly, today the Lib Dems have given us more details of their own programme to combat youth unemployment – the “Youth Contract”. Under the scheme, businesses will be offered £2,200 in wage subsidies to offer jobs to 16- and 17-year-olds. Nick Clegg hopes this scheme will help at least 55,000 young people, and payment will rise the longer the person stays in work.

There is an important difference in approach here. The Conservatives largely believe young people are not getting jobs because of access to the workplace – in effect, the problem is with the jobless, not the supply of jobs. The Lib Dems think differently. They are more concerned with the reluctance of companies to offer paid employment at all, which is why the Youth Contract is focused largely on wage subsidies – something that was at the heart of Labour’s Future Jobs Fund.

The tension between the two parties is real: one Lib Dem told me that getting the Tories to sign up to the wage subsidies in the Youth Contract had been “like pulling teeth”.