Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what assessment she has made of the potential for the kickstart scheme to fill vacancies in the haulage sector.

I refer the Honourable Member to PQ 87676 for a recent breakdown of Kickstart jobs made available and started by sector. This shows that as of 5^th December 6,260 Kickstart jobs were made available within the delivery and storage sector (the nearest applicable sector category), and 3,180 of these jobs had been started by young people.

Kickstart jobs are categorised by the nature of the role rather than the sector of the employer. This means for example, that an administrative job within the haulage sector would be categorised as ‘administrative’, rather than ‘haulage’.

Kickstart jobs are additional and must not displace existing opportunities within the wider labour market. We continue to support employers to fill available jobs including those within the haulage sector for the remainder of the Kickstart Scheme.

More widely, DWP are working with the haulage industry, and the Department for Transport, to provide our work coaches with the knowledge they need to identify suitable candidates and to develop relationships with key employers in their local areas. As a result, local jobcentres are now directly connecting with employers in their area, to discuss their recruitment needs enabling them to provide young people with the skills and knowledge they need to enter the sector.

Although care is taken when processing and analysing Kickstart applications, referrals and starts, the data collected might be subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system which has been developed quickly. The management information presented here has not been subjected to the usual standard of quality assurance associated with official statistics but is provided in the interests of transparency. Work is ongoing to improve the quality of information available for the programme.