White People Blocked From Jobseeker Schemes

White jobseekers are being shut out of taxpayer-funded employment schemes.

A range of employment support programmes offered by local authorities to benefit claimants are open only to ethnic minorities, The Telegraph can reveal.

Critics have described the schemes, which are funded by the taxpayer through multi-billion-pound grants to local government, as an example of “two-tier” Britain.

The public sector has come under pressure to rethink diversity policies following the murder of Henry Nowak, who was handcuffed by police while his Sikh killer was treated as a victim after making false claims of racial abuse.

In Sheffield, the Labour and Green-led city council offers “targeted employment support for ethnic minority groups” as part of its pathways to work programme.

The £340,000 project is operated by local charities and aims to help find jobs for “economically inactive” minorities. But it is part-funded by the “Economic Inactivity Trailblazer” run by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), and the £2.6bn UK Shared Prosperity Fund provided by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG).

The funds are given to local and combined authorities to spend on “levelling up” projects.

Grants were also directed to Andy Burnham’s Greater Manchester combined authority, where they were spent on projects such as providing “culturally appropriate employability support” – including CV workshops and mentoring – for “BAME” (black and minority ethnic) people in Oldham.

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In Scotland, only local black and minority ethnic entrepreneurs were invited to apply for some business growth support programmes by Labour-run North Lanarkshire council.

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The DWP has previously operated its own schemes exclusively for non-white jobseekers, including “mentoring circles”, and the “Moving on Up initiative” in London that was open only to black men.

The department previously said it provided “bespoke programmes” to help “ethnic minority claimants to move into employment”, and that its equality objectives committed it to “tackling employment gap inequalities for ethnic minority jobseekers”.

The schemes are legal under equalities law and are designed to address an unemployment rate currently running at 8.8 per cent among ethnic minorities compared with 4.3 per cent among white people.

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The National Audit Office has been criticised for blocking middle-class white men from applying to an internship open only to applicants who are female, of black heritage or from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

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