Employment Bank
I am encouraged to hear that Alan Milburn is looking into ways to get teenagers into work [1]. It certainly sounds ridiculous to spend 25 times more money on keeping teenagers at home and idle, than on schemes to educate and employ them [2]. But such schemes, though laudable, would themselves be a waste of money if there were, ultimately, no suitable jobs.
I do hope that Alan Milburn and the government will consider the ideas of
a "Job Bank" and "Employment Guarantee". These ideas are straight out of the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) course-work manual, and may be peremptorily and prematurely dismissed as heterodoxy by conventional economists, or dismissed as too socialistic, by politicians (who will know their electorates but may not understand economics).
As I understand it, the idea is that the government should shoulder the ultimate responsibility of finding worthwhile employment for its citizens, and not leave it entirely to Adam Smith's 'invisible hand', or the ingenuity of the citizen. And we (society as a whole) should shoulder the duty for our own benefit, as we similarly provide a modicum of education, and healthcare; simply because we do not want to live amongst un-employed, un-educated and un-healthy people.
(Higher education, and some medical interventions come into a different category; they might have to remain the privilege of 'the few' that can afford and justify the expense.)
I was impressed, as a teenager, at some Victorian building work in (I think) Oban (Argyll & Bute); some local landlord paid for the building of a wall, which has enhanced the town in a small way for more than a century. The scheme worked even without the involvement of government and civil-service.
The jobs offered by the "Job bank" need not be competitive, nor even 'value for money', because money, according to the MMT, is not a limiting factor; but the work should be worthwhile, involve a useful skill, and should confer worth on the worker, and thence self-worth.
Why the government? Well, if the government cannot think up such jobs, how can we expect sixteen-year-olds to think of such.
Furthermore, if it works in the Netherlands [3] why not here? We do not need to 'Reform The Benefit System', as that would take a generation, and another 1,000 civil servants. We just need to set up a "Job bank"; and re-route the dole-queue to their door.
References
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/may/23/uk-young-people-workplace-anxiety-alan-milburn
[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crrpx4p1z71o;
[3] https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/39210798/taxpayers-spend-more-on-benefits-than-jobs/
