Gap-year graduates to be funded by taxpayers

Taxpayers are to fund gap years for graduates to keep them off the dole queue. Hundreds of university leavers will get public money from Lord Mandelson’s department to help them to travel to places such as Costa Rica, Borneo and India.
The class of 2009 — the first to pay top-up fees — faces becoming the “lost generation” in a graduate job market that has shrunk by 20 per cent in the past year.

The number of graduates who are unemployed six months after leaving university has reached its highest level since records began, with one in ten not in jobs or further study. Careers experts say that 80,000 will hunt in vain for work this summer.



A surge in the number of applicants for university — up 10 per cent on last year — means that the situation for this year’s graduates is expected to worsen. Rising numbers will be graduating every summer, adding to the competition for jobs. Critics said that the Government was “bribing” graduates to go on gap years in order to massage unemployment figures.

The first university leavers to take part in the scheme will spend the months up to Christmas living in remote communities and going on expeditions in projects that usually cost £3,000 per person. The advertisement for participants asks: “Have you recently graduated and feel like everything is all doom and gloom?” Joining an overseas expedition “could be just the thing you need to inject some excitement and optimism into your life”. The expedition would “boost your employability skills and help set you apart from the crowd”.

The TaxPayers’ Alliance reacted with anger to the initiative. Matthew Sinclair, its research director, said: “The Government’s attempts to keep people off the unemployment numbers at any cost are growing more and more transparent. It’s increasingly clear that whether it’s soft jobs in the public sector or paying for gap years, the important thing is masking the problems in the economy rather than actually delivering value for taxpayers’ money.” Gap years should be paid for by the travellers or their parents, he added. “This kind of charity, paid for out of the taxpayer’s pocket, is unfair and unsustainable.”