Youth employment is key to revival

Plenty of policy pledges, most notably Lord Laming's recommendations to strengthen child protection, remain uncosted. David Cameron's thrift-conscious Conservatives meanwhile, will abolish the ContactPoint database but we wait to hear what else they will dispense with.

The Chancellor's failure last week to meet the government's 2010 target to halve child poverty was both shameful and imprudent, and has more or less ended uncertainty over that particular pledge. But there was a chink of light to mitigate the gloom, with some welcome interventions to tackle youth unemployment (see p8). The most eye-catching is the £75m Care First scheme to fund 50,000 adult social care apprenticeships for 18- to 24-year-olds who have been jobless for more than a year, with £1,500 subsidies on offer for employers. It's a policy that kills two birds with one stone, lifting young people out of unemployment and addressing the recruitment crisis in social care. Long-term unemployment for young people, who have little or no history of work, can write their prospects off for life and risks creating a generation dependant on benefits. Moreover, the cocktail of problems that often comes with lasting unemployment - depression, family breakdown, substance misuse - would only increase the strain on the social care system.