Furloughed workers should be trained up with new skills, Tony Blair’s son said today.
Euan Blair, who runs an apprenticeship start-up, said there was a “real crisis” for young people who were not going into further education.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme: “At the moment, as we know, the government is spending tens of billions for people to effectively sit at home on furlough.
“But, instead, we could be directing them towards the training that will actually help them get jobs and help them solve the wider skills and productivity crisis as we start to move to the post-Covid world.”
He said it was already happening in Denmark, Austria, France and the Netherlands.
He added: “The labour market is facing an unprecedented level of challenge.”
The son of the former prime minister also wrote for The Times today, saying: “We are in danger of overlooking a solution that is right in front of us: retraining can give people a purpose and fuel our recovery.
"It is helped by a remorseless logic: if we are paying people not to work, shouldn’t we pay for them to do something useful?”
Paul Johnson, director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies economic think tank, estimates the furlough scheme will have cost nearly £100bn by October.
