As the streets of Tunis burned, it was announced that Britain’s youth unemployment had risen to 20.3 per cent.

Unlike Tunisia’s President Zine al-Abidine Ben-Ali, David Cameron won’t be fleeing to Saudi Arabia any time soon.

But in a more low-key, British way, youth unemployment is becoming just as politically toxic as it did in Tunisia.

Once, we were shocked at a million unemployed in the population as a whole. Now, almost as many are jobless among under-24s alone.

 

Youth unemployment permanently scars its victims’ lives – they start behind, and may never catch up.

Even when they get a job, someone who has been out of work for more than a year in their youth will earn as much as 28 per cent less over their lifetime, and is more likely to be convicted of a crime. So society pays, too.

Since leaving school Steven Bourne, 20, from Nottingham, has been looking for a job. In four years he has not found one. “It just goes on and on, and it’s soul-destroying,” he said. “They say they’ll ring you back, but they never do.”

Labour’s leader, Ed Miliband, raised the topic at Prime Minister’s Questions last week. Combined with the axing of the educational maintenance allowance and dramatic rises in student tuition fees, his party thinks it has a potent charge – a government bent on denying the new generation a future.

For the Right, the problem is different. Why, with 150,000 young unemployed in London, does your waiter so seldom have a London accent?

In The Sunday Telegraph last week a Midlands fruit farmer, Christine Snell, told how she had dozens of unskilled jobs – but couldn’t get young Britons for any of them.

Over the past week, The Sunday Telegraph has tried to explore the issue.

We talked to young jobseekers and employers in jobless blackspots up and down the country. There was a significant variation in youth unemployment between places with quite similar rates of adult unemployment.

Birmingham, for instance, has a significantly worse youth unemployment rate than Manchester, though their adult unemployment rates are much closer together.

We focused on Nottingham, a city neither northern nor southern, neither predominantly industrial nor predominantly white-collar, but which, on the latest figures, has one of Britain’s lowest rates of employment.

Unlike Mrs Snell, many employers around Nottingham do not seem to suffer from work-shy youths. To post a vacancy is to be besieged.

Sanglier, a packaging company, wants an admin assistant on £11,500 to £13,500 a year. “The advert went up on Wednesday, and the response has been ridiculously high,” said the company’s Rachael Bingley. “I have had 74 emails and three through the post. Most seem to be men and most are young graduates.”

A minimum-wage job at MCG, a manufacturing company, had about 60 applicants. “About three quarters of them are under 25. They look quite good quality, and some are very promising,” said a spokesman.

Vanda Brelsford of Abitech Systems, which makes printer cartridges and wants an administrator, said: “We had so many applicants that I had to close down the email for a bit.” The manager at Rileys Sports Bar said he was “looking at a big pile of about 70 applications” for a barman job.

Hotels, security firms, building companies, petrol stations and shops all report greatly increased numbers of applicants as the downturn bites.

In an email age, of course, it is far easier to volley off applications than it was — perhaps five or 10 in an hour — which may account for some of those alarming stories about hundreds of people chasing every job. Not all applications seem serious. At the Nottingham Fire Place Company, email was not used. Jobseekers had to telephone for a sales job. About 50 called, but only 15 bothered to follow up, as requested, with a letter and CV. “I’ve been absolutely gobsmacked at the quality,” said the manager, Andrew Riley. “It’s been very poor. We’ve had interest from people of school-leaving age and the impression I get is that they’re just not well-educated. They have generally had poor communication skills and don’t really know how to handle themselves in the manner you’d need for this job.”

Dominic Duffy, the owner of Triple D Express, delivery company, is advertising for casual staff. He said: “I think people on benefits turn up for interview so they can tell the Jobcentre staff they’ve been 'actively seeking employment’. But really, they would rather stay on benefits.”

We also found one job, a part-time cook, which had had no applicants at all.

Yet you cannot always blame people for this. When I visited Rochdale, Britain’s worst unemployment pocket, there were 903 jobs at the local Jobcentre. Large numbers, however, turned out to be part-time or casual, leaving you little better off than staying on the dole, or temporary, involving much bureaucratic hassle to get back on benefits at the end of your employment, or a winning combination of all three.

In our experience in Nottingham, the fireplace firm excepted, employers offering permanent, full-time work (however low-paid) tended to be happier with the quality of their applicants. Those offering part-time, temporary or casual work tended to be less happy. Perhaps there is a lesson for employers, as much as employees, here.

Nottingham youngsters, in particular, kept coming back to the age-old Catch-22 of the young jobseeker: you can’t get a job without experience, and you can’t get experience without a job.

“Believe me, I would love to make some money,” said Marcia Francis, 24, a single mother. “But it’s really hard out there.”

Francis McElvaney, 19, wants to work as a care assistant, but has no qualifications. “I am certain I would soon learn,” she said. “I am Nottingham born and bred, but all these foreigners coming in are getting jobs in care homes and I can’t.”

In Aldershot, Hampshire, Lucy Garstin, 23, said: “How do you get the qualifications when you have debts? If they paid me to do the training, it would be all right.”

For all Labour’s huffing and puffing on the issue, youth unemployment really started to climb during its time in power. In 2007, it was little more than 500,000.

Much of the problem is clearly a legacy of Labour’s underperforming education system, which left many young Britons significantly less useful to British employers than their counterparts educated in Eastern Europe.

Even though most young Britons may sincerely want to work, at least to start with, many employers reported that some lacked the most basic abilities needed to do so, such as communication, literacy and interaction with others.

“A lot of them could barely speak coherently,” said one Rochdale employer.

“Soft skills” didn’t matter so much when Britain was more a manufacturing economy, but these days, the vast majority of jobs seem to need them. And of course, people’s keenness to find work will probably fall off in the face of repeated rejection.

“I was looking for about a year, but I gave up for six months because I was tired,” said Samkung Sanneh, 22, in Stratford, east London. “There were hardly any jobs that didn’t need experience. It was very dispiriting.”

The longer this goes on, the worse your chances get. In an economy likely to recover only slowly for years, the prospect looms of a permanent group of people, hundreds of thousands strong, that will never know proper work.

In 2009, after years of failure with various job-creation schemes, Labour came up with something more interesting. Frank Field, the free-thinking Labour MP who is now the Coalition’s “poverty tsar”, called it “one of the most precious things the last government was involved in, a lifeline that no amount of 'New Deal’ or our rhetoric ever offered the unemployed”.

Its official name is the Future Jobs Fund (FJF), but the great thing about it for the unemployed is that it is not a scheme. What it gives them, for six months, is an actual job, with normal employment status and a normal salary, usually the minimum wage. The only difference is that their salary is paid by the Government, up to £6,500 per person.

The idea is to give the young unemployed confidence, the disciplines of work, experience, references, and something to put on their CVs; to make them, over the six months, somebody who you would hire without a government subsidy.

Written evidence in a recent report by the Commons’ work and pensions select committee is filled with rapturous testimony by people on the FJF: Joshua Brown, a young man working for the Chevin Housing Group, said: “It’s changed my life. I absolutely adore my job.”

Some said they had not even realised they were on a government programme. The Royal Opera House, which took a dozen youngsters from poor and often ethnic minority backgrounds into its middle-class, white workforce, called it a “breakthrough”.

The fund is too new to have been properly evaluated, but the Department for Work and Pensions told the committee that overall 50 per cent of FJF participants were back on benefits after six months. Which rather suggests that 50 per cent — or 24,000 young people — were not: a pretty successful outcome.

Last May, as one of its first acts, the Coalition scrapped the Future Jobs Fund. At £326 million a year, ministers said it was costing too much; even Labour only intended it to be temporary. But its replacement, the Work Programme, will be another scheme, paying only benefits.

The MPs’ report is filled with condemnation of the decision, not just from the usual suspects, such as the TUC, but from Tory-controlled councils.

Norfolk said the fund had a “significant impact” on youth unemployment and its scrapping “disappointed” employers. Oxfordshire said: “It has enjoyed great success, almost 60 per cent of those who have completed the programme have remained employed beyond six months. Oxfordshire has been disadvantaged by its loss.”

Hampshire spoke of its “significant benefits,” with a 47 per cent employment rate. Birmingham city council, home of the nation’s highest youth unemployment and pioneer of Lib-Con coalitions, said it got more than 30 per cent into jobs and many others into education, “significantly better than the New Deal”. Its demise, the council said, would “mean the loss of a large number of very high-quality employment opportunities. This is a programme that has not been allowed to prove itself or develop.” That was the MPs’ conclusion, too.

One initiative will not solve deep-seated problems of skills and demoralisation in some of Britain’s young unemployed. The Coalition’s reforms of the benefit system, to remove incentives to stay on the dole, may do far more to get young people into work.

And nothing can be a substitute for economic recovery, which ministers say is threatened by the deficit and excessive government spending.

Youth unemployment blackspots suggest that as well as national programmes, effort is clearly needed to address particular local issues — perhaps the economic or ethnic mix — which are causing problems in some places. And though doom-laden articles have been written about young people’s hopeless future for as long as there have been newspapers, the think-tank Demos found last year that young graduates, in particular, were becoming ever more entrepreneurial, making their own opportunities in the frontier zone between internship and self-employment, or exploiting the fact that new technology has made realising some business ideas cheaper than before.

Many other youngsters will not be so motivated, though. The Future Jobs Fund had significant weaknesses; the jobs had to have “community benefits,” so it was difficult for private-sector employers to take part. It was very expensive; doing it for all the young employed would cost more than £6  billion. But it probably would have helped some of the young people we talked to in Nottingham.