Gordon Brown Pledges To Safeguard UK Jobs

Speaking at a Jobs Summit this morning, The Prime Minister has pledged £500million to help people who have been unemployed for more than six into jobs or work-based training as the government attempts to stem further increases in unemployment.Firms would also be paid up to £2,500 for every person they train who has been unemployed for more than six months.

The Prime Minister said: "We know that any action we take has costs...But the biggest cost of all would be the cost of doing nothing...Failure to act now, and to do so in coordination with our international partners, would mean a deeper and longer recession, it would mean temporary rises in unemployment made permanent, with whole communities written off as we saw in the past..."And that would mean lasting damage to our economy and a bigger bill to pay in the future. That will not happen on my watch..."We will do everything we can to prevent the global recession turning into a global depression, to prevent short term unemployment turning into long term unemployment, and to prevent losing your job meaning losing your home.

"We can not always prevent people losing the last job but we can help people get the next job. So that the inevitable increase in short term unemployment which we are certainly facing is never again allowed to become the long term unemployment that scarred so many lives and communities in the past. We have to get these people back into work."

Commenting on the investment, Kevin Green, chief executive, Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC), says: “The key is to ensure that broad employment strategies actually work on the ground and at a local level. Within this context, the active cooperation between job centres and private sector recruitment agencies will be crucial to ensure that job seekers get the right support and guidance. This is especially true at the high end where specialised recruiters have expert knowledge of their sector and can move people into appropriate new work opportunities quickly...Incentivising employers to take on longer-term unemployed may act as a prompt but the key is to ensure that we limit the number of job seekers falling into that category in the first place - for example, by making the most of the UK’s flexible labour market and the opportunities that temporary, contract and interim work can provide. The preventative measure of helping new job seekers access short-term opportunities is as important as the ”cure” of incentivising the recruitment of the long-term unemployed.”