Almost half a million young people have been unable to move from learning into employment after being "shut out" from finding their first job amid changes to the type of skills firms require, according to new research.

The Work Foundation said there had been a "major" increase in the number of 16 to 24-year-olds who were not switching from education to the world of work.

The report, covering England, said young people were finding it harder to get a foothold in the jobs market because of long-term changes to the type of skills they were expected to have as the UK economy moves from being reliant on production to services.
%VIRTUAL-ArticleSidebar%

So-called soft skills such as communication are increasingly important, but the education and training system has not adapted to reflect the changes, said the report.

Around 450,000 youngsters in England have no experience of sustained paid employment beyond casual and holiday work, said the research group.

Dr Paul Sissons, the report's author, said: "The labour market has changed considerably over the past few decades. First jobs are now less likely to be in manufacturing and more likely to be in the service sector where skills such as communication, team working and customer service are important.

"For young people without the soft skills needed to access work in these growing sectors, finding employment has become increasingly difficult.

"A period of worklessness while young can detrimentally impact peoples' careers over the longer term. More needs to be done to support young people at this crucial point of transition, and local service provision must be geared up to address this aim.

"This requires consistent support and effective co-ordination of services across local government, schools, employers and the third sector to prevent more young people from falling through the gaps in public provision."

 

More stories

Greece's four biggest commercial banks are to receive an 18 billion euros (£14.5 billion) cash injection from the European bailout fund.

The recapitalisation comes amid political uncertainty in the debt-stricken country after inconclusive elections on May 6 saw a rise in support for anti-bailout parties and cast doubt over Greece's future involvement in the single currency.

• Cameron urges Greeks to make choice
• Greek exit could cost $1 trillion
• How does a country leave the euro?

Clothing retailers suffered their worst sales performance in nearly four years in April, official figures have shown, as heavy rain dampened demand for a new summer wardrobe.

Clothing sales volumes plunged 5.2% month on month in April, the lowest level since June 2008, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said, as retailers failed to shift summer clothing stocked up in unseasonably warm March.

Total retail sales volumes plunged by a worse-than-expected 2.3% on the month, the lowest level in nearly two-and-a-half years, although this was distorted by a record plunge in petrol and diesel sales following the threat of a fuel tanker strike the previous month.

Stripping out the impact of fuel sales, total retail sales volumes were down 1%, the worst performance excluding fuel in a nearly a year, the ONS said.

A survey from the British Retail Consortium showed that Britain's high streets witnessed the worst decline in shopper numbers since November 2009 in the wettest April since records began in 1910.

The number of shoppers in town centres, where more than one in 10 premises lie empty, fell 12.6% last month compared with April 2011. The inclement weather triggered a 1.7% drop at non-food stores, the ONS said, while food stores saw a 0.6% decline.

The bad weather also hit so-called other stores, a broad category including toy shops, garden centres and jewellers.

Retail sales volumes lifted 2% month on month in March, boosted by a 5.3% rise in fuel, as the threat of a tanker strike triggered panic-buying across the country. As a result, consumers brought forward their fuel purchases from April, while the ONS said some filling stations were unable to sufficiently restock.

Non-store retailing volumes, which include internet sales, increased 1.4% on the month.

Consumers spent £25.9 billion in the four weeks of April, compared with £32.6 billion in the five weeks of March. The average weekly amount spent online is now up 18% when compared with a year ago at £489 million.

More stories

Car giants Mazda and Fiat are working together on developing and manufacturing a roadster, or two-seater convertible, although the two companies will come up with different, distinctly styled models.

The Japanese and Italian firms confirmed that they have signed an agreement for the project.

They declined to give details but said their co-operation for Fiat's Alfa Romeo model and the Mazda vehicle will be based on Mazda's "next-generation MX-5 rear-wheel-drive architecture".
%VIRTUAL-ArticleSidebar%

Each car maker will use its own engines and own styling in their vehicle, they said.

Hiroshima-based Mazda has been struggling, racking up four straight years in the red, after its ties with US car giant Ford weakened.

"Establishing technology and product development alliances is one of Mazda's corporate objectives, and this announcement with Fiat is an important first step in that direction," said Mazda president Takashi Yamanouchi.

Fiat chief executive Sergio Marchionne said working with Mazda was part of an effort to grow into "a truly global brand", and deliver "an exciting and stylish roadster in the Alfa Romeo tradition".

Speculation has been rife that Mazda might need a partner, perhaps one of the emerging Chinese makers, if it hopes to ride out the intense competition in the industry.

For the fiscal year ended March, Mazda's losses ballooned from 60 billion yen (£477 million) to 107 billion yen (£850 million) as vehicle sales declined across all regions except for North America. It is planning a return to the black for the fiscal year through March 2013.

Dearborn-based Ford bought 25% of Mazda in 1979, raising it to 33.4% in 1996. But Ford began cutting ties in 2008, and in 2010 reduced its ownership to 3.5%.

More stories

A new player in the small business lending market is set to emerge after building society Nationwide unveiled plans to build up a range of services in the coming years.

Nationwide, which has previously only hinted at providing financial services to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), said it wanted to play an increasing role in providing credit to an "important part of the UK economy".

The move comes at a time when SME lending remains under the spotlight following pressure on Britain's top five banks to provide more credit to struggling businesses.
%VIRTUAL-ArticleSidebar%

Nationwide confirmed the plans as it revealed a 10% rise in underlying profits to £304 million on a 10% rise in underlying income to £2.1 billion.

Nationwide chief executive Graham Beale has previously said that SME lending would be a "good strategic fit" for the building society - but corporate customers should not expect loans to be available until late next year.

"We're already a lender to the commercial real estate sector, we've been asked by customers to provide them with a corporate lending facility," he said. "We just feel it's a natural extension of what we can do." He added: "We're quite confident there's sufficient demand."

The Project Merlin agreement last year was drawn up between the Government and banks in a move designed to boost lending to SMEs.

Lloyds Banking Group, Royal Bank of Scotland, Santander UK, Barclays and HSBC agreed with the Government to increase lending available to SMEs to £76 billion and boost lending available to all businesses to £190 billion.

The final figures confirmed that the five banks missed gross lending targets for small businesses last year by more than £1 billion but beat the target for all businesses by £24.9 billion.

Meanwhile, the building society said it increased gross mortgage lending by 44% to £18.4 billion in the year to April 4 in a market which grew only 5%. More than 24,000 first-time buyers took out a mortgage with Nationwide in the period, compared to 22,200 the previous year.

More stories

The foundations for the European Union lay in the wreckage that was early post-war Europe, with a new generation of politicians desperate to find a way to prevent such a calamity ever happening again.

It was a noble aim, but their political ambition greatly overshadowed their economic competence, and their rushed attempts to force a bunch of disparate countries into a federal Europe, which was always their aim, were doomed to fail.

A federal Europe would have, as one of its necessary constituents, a common currency. So get everyone to jump on the eurozone cart, and a horse will be along to pull it shortly. Such was the idea.

Currency union
If you ask a bunch of economists to list the requirements for a successful currency, I expect most would suggest that the body in control of a currency should also control its own fiscal policy.
%VIRTUAL-ArticleSidebar%

The idea is that money supply and interest rates are just part of the toolbox, with tax collection, redistribution, government borrowing and expenditure being their essential counterparts.

The euro dreamers weren't stupid, and they knew that perfectly well. In fact, a centralised European fiscal policy was exactly what they wanted to achieve. But without having it at the outset, they knew they had to get fiscal policies across all of the EU states more closely aligned if they were to give the new currency a chance.

That's what the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 was all about. It committed the member states to keep inflation within a narrow range, but, more importantly, it imposed a rule that government deficit in any one year should not exceed 3% of gross domestic product (GDP) for the previous year. If those targets could be achieved, there would hopefully be sufficient economic convergence for the next steps towards federalism.

Not going to make it
Unfortunately, it soon became clear that a number of European economies, most notably Italy, were simply not close to the requirements. The sensible thing to do might have been to push back the timescale and spend another decade or two working towards economic convergence before jumping into the deep water of currency union.

But that wouldn't satisfy the fast-track federalists. They wanted union, and they wanted it within their political lifetimes, so that it would be their names that went down in the history books.

So, in subsequent treaties, economic requirements were weakened, and as long as fiscal policies were sort of generally moving in the right direction, all would hopefully work out in the end.

Cooked books
But as we now know, it didn't. The weakened fiscal requirements meant that European states could enter union with very fuzzy sets of accounts, and a number of them badly represented the real states of their economies. Italy was nowhere near the original convergence criteria. And Greece's books, well, they might as well have been written by Enid Blyton.

The result was a mix of the prudent Germans with their strong dislike of borrowing, the French a little way behind but with generally sound policies, and the southern states with a historic love of putting government borrowing and spending ahead of productivity.

And they all had brand new abilities to borrow money much more cheaply than before -- lenders put far more trust in the ECB and the euro, than in the drachma and lira and the banks of southern Europe.

Borrow like there's no tomorrow
We've seen the result -- a massive borrowing and spending spree by countries whose productivity could not support it, and who ultimately could not repay their debts. It was a bit like handing out a joint credit card to every household in the street, with the only real restriction being: "Please try not to spend too much".

Ironically, now that Europe has failed so badly, it's suddenly become time to force sound fiscal policies on everyone again -- when the worst economies are already on their knees. Lovers of horse-and-cart analogies really couldn't make it up.

And in further irony, the failures and the austerity regimes are leading to the rise once again of extreme nationalist politics, and are forcing the people of Europe further apart in their views. The Greeks don't want to be told what to do by Germans they didn't elect. And why should they?

What next?
But the tattered federalist ideology remains astoundingly stubborn. Even this week, we've had German ex-Chancellor Gerhard Shröder, talking in Der Spiegel, calling for faster political unification as the way out of the mess. If he thinks there's any chance of that happening now, he's not even in the same solar system as the rest of us.

What we need now is for the old, failed, post-war federalist generation to be put out to pasture, and for Europe to be driven by sound economic policies as a free market of independent states. That, inevitably, must mean the end of the eurozone as we know it. It might not mean total collapse, and once Greece has left (for its own good, to give it the most realistic economic chance it now has), a new version might take shape.

But its architects will need to get their animals and vehicles the right way round. And not mention the war.

More stories

The wills of millions of famous Britons including Florence Nightingale and Winston Churchill are being published online for the first time.

Family history website Ancestry.co.uk said six million probate records are included in the collection, dating from 1942 to 1966.

The records show that former prime minister Churchill left effects totalling more than £300,000, while wartime nurse Florence Nightingale left an estate worth £36,000.

Comedian and singer George Formby left almost £150,000, while Welsh poet Dylan Thomas left just £100, according to the collection.
%VIRTUAL-ArticleSidebar%

Ancestry.co.uk international content director Miriam Silverman said: "These new records give a fascinating insight into the final estates of some of Britain's most recognisable faces and reveal that money and fame did not always go hand in hand.

"They also provide a rich source of information for anybody interested in uncovering the finer details of their ancestor's finances and exactly what, if anything, they decided to leave and to whom."

More stories

Yesterday's annual Scottish Widows Pensions Report made gloomy reading. As I've written before, the combination of inadequate savings, poor investment returns and low annuity rates has resulted in millions of pension savers looking set for a penurious old age.

And looking at the report, it's difficult to trump the words of Toby Strauss, group director of insurance at Lloyds Banking Group (LSE: LLOY), which these days owns Scottish Widows:

"After years of blood, sweat and tears, the UK pensions market is about to reach its moment of truth. A stark difference remains between what people expect they need to save, and the reality which would secure a comfortable retirement."
%VIRTUAL-ArticleSidebar%

Consumers' confidence that their pension will deliver that comfortable retirement has never been worse, he continues, and retirement savings have now hit a record low.

Nor is this mere idle rhetoric. Scottish Widows' annual report is reckoned to be the UK's most authoritative survey of consumers' preparation for retirement, and since 2005 the firm has surveyed and scrutinised the views of over 40,000 people.

Stark statistics
Let's briefly look at the picture uncovered by the survey:

Shocking, isn't it? And in my book, Tom McPhail, the ever-amiable head of pensions research at Hargreaves Lansdown summarises the situation quite nicely:

"The message that we should be putting in front of every adult of working age is that it pays to save, and that any delay just makes the hill steeper to climb."

Climbing that hill
So there we have it. Most people have inadequate retirement savings -- and the hill that they must climb to get to the point where a comfortable retirement looks assured is getting steeper with every passing year.

What to do? First, of course, get the basics right.

Power your portfolio
But more to the point -- in what assets, precisely, should you invest?

Conventional wisdom, for instance, speaks of splitting your investments between equities and gilts. Gilts? In today's world, as Fool writer Cliff D'Arcy wrote last week, gilt prices can only go one way.

Cash? Don't make me laugh. Property? Ditto.

Which leaves a portfolio of shares. And hopefully, bearing in mind the ever-steepening hill that you've got to climb in order to catch up, that portfolio will be packed with shares carefully chosen for their potential to outperform.

Your retirement, in short, is down to you. Don't delay -- start rescuing it today.

More stories