McFadden hails ‘inspiring’ jobs programme for young people as number of Neets drops – UK politics live

Hello, and welcome to our UK politics blog. It’s all work, work, work this morning, with the government sounding a triumphant note over its jobs guarantee scheme to get young people into work, while the prime minister is due to visit Wales to speak to workers and apprentices. The work and pensions secretary, Pat McFadden, declared “work is good for you” during a trip to Boots’s headquarters in Nottingham yesterday, where he met some of the first cohort of 18- to 21-year-olds recruited under the scheme. “It’s bad for your mental health to be sitting at home, isolated,” he added. You can read more on that here: McFadden was put to work earlier in the day when he visited Sainsbury’s in south-west London, stacking shelves in the bread aisle with Andy Burnham and the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, after the government announced the supermarket would offer 10,000 work experience placements for young people. We covered the main points of that announcement in yesterday’s live blog. Tackling yout