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£1.8 million boost for Leeds teenage job hunters
Unemployed young people in Leeds are to be given a £1.75m boost by the city council to help them find work and training.
The council is planning to spend the cash over the next 12 months on a range of economic initiatives to create jobs, training opportunities and apprenticeships.
City chiefs hope their plans will go someway to helping tackle a national youth crisis in which more than one million young people are jobless.
The moves in Leeds include the creation of a new Apprenticeship Training Agency by the council and Leeds City College and supported by the Chamber of Commerce. It will help small and medium-sized businesses take on more apprentices.
A £100,000 programme will also be launched to encourage Leeds’s top 100 firms to promote jobs and skills. The aim is to build on the success of last year’s Leeds Apprentice Challenge, which asked 100 employers in the city to create 100 apprenticeship places in 100 days. Over 160 employers came forward to offer a total of 375 places.
In the longer term, the council is planning to invest £15m over three years to support innovation and economic initiatives.
The council is already working with partners to maximise the job opportunities offered by the Leeds Arena, Trinity Leeds shopping scheme – both under construction – and other planned developments expected to create about 7,500 jobs.
Between August 2010 and July 2011 there were 7,030 new apprenticeships in Leeds – a 98 per cent increase on the previous year.
But despite that success, the number of young people aged 16-24 not in employment, education or training – 1,880 – remains above the national average.
Coun Keith Wakefield, council leader, said: “The future economic prosperity of our city depends on helping people find work and through the idea of civic enterprise we want to work even harder with our partners and organisations in all sectors and all areas of our city to identify and create new job opportunities.
“The success of the last year or so in terms of apprenticeship creation provides a strong platform but we must now think bigger, go further and look at new relationships and new ideas to make even more of a difference.”
The £1.75m spending forms parts of the council’s proposed 2012-13 budget.
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Tuesday 22 May 2012
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