The forgotten youngsters of Britain

24th June 07
The forgotten youngsters of Britain - a national disgrace

The OECD issued a report on Friday showing that youth unemployment (that's those aged 15-24) rose from 10.9% to 13.9% between 2004 and 2006. Indeed unemployed males increased from 11.8% to 15.8%. This is nothing short of a national disgrace. Indeed the number of young people between the ages of 16-24 who are not in employment, education or training of some sort, is now 1,288,745 - up over 10% since Labour came to power in 1997. This despite Labour spending £2b on the so called New Deal for Young People between 1997 and 2005.

As readers know I have a very personal interest in this via the Prince's Trust where, together with like minded people like James Bennett, John O'Connell, Steve Allen and others, we set up the Prince's Trust Technology Leadership Group ( more details Click here) in 2002 to raise funds from the technology sector to help the Prince's Trust in this crucial area. In a variety of schemes - some which help young people to setup business, some schemes that help people at school or others to just help people to get their confidence back so they can get a life again. The Prince's Trust "mentoring" programme means that their success rates are very high. Higher than the VCs and Banks and certainly a lot more effective than any current Government scheme. On top of that 89p in every £ raised actually goes where it is intended - one of the highest % in the charity world.Given this remarkable success, you would expect that the Govt would be supporting the Prince's Trust as "the way forward" to help tackle this problem. For many years there was a matching funding programme from the Govt. So that, say, the £50,000 raised from Holway's ICT Leaders Dinner was doubled up to £100,00 from HM Govt. A couple of years back Gordon Brown decided to halt this scheme. It was replaced by a load of regional schemes (all of which have to be applied for separately) which is much more inefficient. The Prince's Trust income has clearly suffered as a result.

Anyway, one way you could help is to join the Prince's Trust Technology Leadership Group. 60 of the leading tech firms in the UK incl Capgemini, BT, Accenture and many others already are. Or you could come to our next event.

On 2nd July we are holding our Summer Reception on the 31st floor of Barclay's offices in Canary Wharf. I have called it Video kills the TV Stars? and we have Mike Lynch (CEO of Autonomy and its spin off; the video search company Blinkx) and Ashley Highfield who is the Director at the BBC responsible for New Media; in other words all their Web 2.0 activities.

Please come. Great evening. Great cause!

More details and to book Click here

Or email Elizabeth.Royds@princes-trust.org.uk