Andrew Dismore

During the Mayors Question Time on 23rd May, Andrew Dismore AM asks Mayor Boris Johnson what he will be doing to lower the number of long term youth unemployed in London.

Stephen Knight (AM): Mr Mayor, you said, did you not, in this very Chamber only a couple of months ago that public trust in statistics is critically important to democracy. Do you really think that by trying to present 174 additional jobs in house building, which is what we are talking about over the next 4 years, is 100,000 new jobs, you are really creating public trust in the statistics which you put forward?

Boris Johnson (Mayor of London): Yes.

Stephen Knight (AM): I think most Londoners —

Boris Johnson (Mayor of London):  I think most Londonders will listen to you explaining how 174 people are going to apparently build 54,000 homes. You know, it is perfectly obvious that we have a very ambitious programme that involves investing in transport and in housing. It is vital that we fight together for those funds and we take the city forward. That is what I want to do.

Andrew Dismore (AM): Of these hundreds of thousands of new jobs you are proposing to create, how many are going to be long-term young unemployed people? How many permanent full-time jobs for young people are you going to create, bearing in mind your abject failure to deal with long-term youth unemployment in the last year?

Boris Johnson (Mayor of London): Well, as I say, the most important thing is to get young people into a position where they can take those jobs. I think one of the most worrying features of theLondon economy has been our difficulty in translatingLondon’s ability to create jobs into real benefits for young people in this city. That is why the apprenticeship programme is so important and why we put so much store by it and why we will continuing to expand it.

Andrew Dismore (AM): Last year long-term youth unemployment inLondon more than doubled to 20,000. Youth unemployment generally is 53,000 under your watch last year, and you cannot give me a figure of how many of these new jobs are going to be for long-term unemployed young Londoners. If you are putting forward these pledges of 200,000 jobs you are going to create, you should ideally, I would have thought, know how many of those are going to be for young people. I am not talking about apprenticeships; I am talking about proper, long-term, full-time employment for young people. How many?

Boris Johnson (Mayor of London): The obvious commonsensical answer, Andrew, is as many as possible.

Andrew Dismore (AM): That means you do not know, does it not? Again a figure you do not know.

Boris Johnson (Mayor of London): How can anybody possibly know how many young people we will succeed in —

Andrew Dismore (AM): We know ho many are out of work now, do we not?

Boris Johnson (Mayor of London): Yes, but, if I may say so, I think you are slightly trivialising the problem.

Andrew Dismore (AM): I am not trivialising the problem.

Boris Johnson (Mayor of London): You are.

Andrew Dismore (AM): You have put forward a target. It is a simple question: how many from that target are going to be for long-term, young unemployed? It is a simple question; you do not know the answer.

Boris Johnson (Mayor of London): The answer is as many as possible, and we achieve that by rolling out our apprenticeship programme, by encouraging small business to take on young people and by doing everything we can to promote the employment of young people across the city and that is what we are going to do.

Andrew Dismore (AM): You do not know. That is, you do not know.