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| Tory MP for Folkestone & Hythe Damian Collins |
The Conservative MP was responding to Stella Creasy (Lab: Walthamstow) who said to him "some young people were struggling to scratch together the travel fare to look for jobs". This caused Mr Collins to reveal "when he had worked for advertising agency M&C Saatchi the creative director had told him he had ‘busked to raise the train fare to get into London" he added: "Getting the job you’ve wanted in a city like London has always taken a lot of personal motivation".
The Shadow Work & Pensions Secretary responding to Mr Collins' comments went on record and said: “This tells you everything you need to know about the Tories’ attitude to getting our young people back to work. They are out of touch, out of ideas and frankly out of order. “In the week when a cross-party Select Committee slammed the Government’s Youth Contract, it is a complete disgrace for a Tory A-lister to blame young people for his Government’s failure. “Damian Collins must now apologise to the million young people out of work that his Government is letting down so badly.
The Leader of the Green party, Natalie Bennett told the Politico Daily: “Young people are priced off the railways because the train fares carry the huge burden of rail privatisation. We should renationalize the railways and use the £1bn saving to cut fares and improve services. Mr Collins’s party should be considering how to create real jobs for young people rather than pricing them off the rail networks.”
A senior Liberal Democrat source told me: "Mr Collins may well like to Busk his way to work, but things have changed since the 'good old days'. Busking now requires a license which costs money. Perhaps he wants to establish a pot of funding to help young unemployed pay for that license? Or perhaps he can be more constructive and suggest ideas which will actually help our young people."
There are more than a million people under-25 are unemployed in Britain. Education minister Mark Hoban said getting young people into work is his ‘number one priority’. The work programme is helping 160,000 youths into work, by paying employers £2,275 a time to employ them while the youth contract is creating 250,000 work experience places. David Miliband said "the measures do not go far enough It’s like taking out a pea shooter to try to destroy a tank."
