UK Recession: Unemployment on the rise for long term

The report carried by The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) think tank also confirm that another 107,000 Britons will join the ranks of the long-term unemployed in the coming months, taking the total to its highest level since 1995. IPPR have called the alarming figures as the “hidden crisis” facing the UK economy.

IPPR’s chief economist, Tony Dolphin, said: “Long-term unemployment is the hidden crisis of the slowest ever economic recovery in the UK. While the youth contract is designed to help young people out of work for more than a year, the Work Programme has only been able to secure employment for about a third of jobseekers on the programme.

“On current progress, just two-thirds of people out of work for a year will not get work in the following two years. Government policy is not keeping pace with joblessness.

“Unemployment is not going to fall until the middle of 2013 and the number of people out of work for more than a year is going to grow to almost a million the end of this year. The longer someone is unemployed, the less likely they are to ever return to work.

“The Government should guarantee everyone who has been unemployed for more than a year a job at the minimum wage in local government or the voluntary sector. But with that right should come the responsibility to take that job or risk losing their benefits.”
The British Government failed to comment on the current economic crisis.