Daily roundup: youth unemployment, benefit cap, and mental health

The Government’s flagship scheme to tackle youth unemployment has been branded a failure by its own advisers, who have urged ministers to offer a “work guarantee” to jobless under 25-year-olds. The Independent reports that the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission has discovered that only 21,000 applications were made to the Youth Contract by May this year, and only 2,070 payments made for young people completing 26 weeks on the scheme. This means that, a quarter of the way through the programme, only one eighth of the places, and one-eightieth of the subsidies, have been used.

A report has predicted that the government's benefit cap will struggle to meet its aims of encouraging people into work and saving money. The BBC reports that a study by the Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) found that just 10 per cent of 747 households affected in Haringey were known to have found jobs and nearly half got extra funds from the council to make up for money lost. The research found that about 2,300 children were affected by the cap in Haringey alone, with larger families losing the most.