18th December 2025
The Department for Work and Pensions are keen to speak employment support providers and organisations involved in helping young people into work, to provide more details about the Jobs Guarantee, which will see an initial launch in Spring with a full roll out nationally later in 2026. The Jobs Guarantee was announced by the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions on 6 December and forms part of the wider Youth Guarantee, which sees £820m of investment in young people over the next three years.
The Jobs Guarantee is for long-term unemployed young people, who don’t enter employment despite significant support. It will provide fully-funded paid employment to 18-21 years who have been on Universal Credit and looking for work for 18 months. The funding will cover six months of paid employment – this will be 100% of employment costs for 25 hours a week at the relevant minimum wage, plus additional wraparound support.
The first phase will provide jobs to more than 1,000 young people. Once we get to full-roll out we expect to support 55,000 young people through the scheme. We will use learning from phase 1 to inform design of full roll out later in 2026. We will target the following areas in the initial phase:
• Birmingham & Solihull
• East Midlands
• Greater Manchester
• Hertfordshire & Essex
• Central & East Scotland
• Southwest & Southeast Wales
In this initial stage we will be delivering through partner organisations as intermediaries. We would look to these experienced partner organisations to both identify the jobs in their local areas and put together the bespoke wrap around support. We want to speak to ERSA members and affiliates to outline how they can get involved and, as we are planning for an announcement in mid-January, the timetable and likely steps involved.