Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram offers Liverpool city region employers £3,000 to persuade them to create more jobs for young adults. Tony McDonough reports
Almost £800,000 is being allocated by Metro Mayor Steve Rotheram to fund incentives for Liverpool city region employers to create jobs for 18 to 25-year-olds.
Liverpool City Region Combined Authority has approved an extra £795,000 from the Strategic Investment Fund for Mr Rotheram’s Young Person’s Guarantee (YPG) scheme, one of his manifesto pledges.
It promises a job, training or apprenticeship opportunity to every young person in Liverpool, Wirral, Sefton, Knowsley, St Helens and Halton out of work, education or training for more than six months.
This new phase of the scheme will see wage incentives of £3,000 offered to local employers who recruit young people. The aim is to get 240 more people aged 18 to 25 into education, employment or training over the next three years.
It will support an additional 720 young people with one-to-one personal advice and mentoring. It will aim to give 4,500 young people aged 18 to 24 access to job opportunities by 2026.
Mr Rotheram said: “I launched the YPG with a clear purpose – to send all our young people a promise of hope.
“Because, for far too long, too many people in our area have been held back from fulfilling their potential, not by a lack of talent, but a lack of opportunity.
“I’m doing everything in my power to connect people to opportunities and attract more jobs to our area but, to get to the front of the queue, we need to ensure local people have the skills and experience to seize the opportunities that lie ahead for our economy.”
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In 2023 the Mayor launched a drive to encourage big employers to transfer tens of millions of pounds of unspent Apprenticeship Levy funding to help smaller firms fund local training.
To date the Combined Authority has helped to transfer £3.2m of unspent levy funding to create 695 apprenticeships.
And using the Flexible Support Fund, a new network of youth hubs has helped more than 3,500 people to access a range of services-such as neurodiversity support, job search and employer sessions.