The author presents a critical early appraisal of the British Labour Government's ‘New Deal’ welfare-to-work programme for 18–24 year-olds. A key element in the Government's strategy for tackling social exclusion, the New Deal represents a major financial and political commitment, yet perhaps more fundamentally it reflects a change in Labour's thinking about the underlying causes of, and appropriate remedies for, unemployment. Drawing on a behaviourist, supply-side, explanation of ‘welfare dependency’, the aim of the programme is not to create jobs (as it was for ‘Old Labour’) but to (re)create a work ethic — to raise ‘employability’ amongst young people. This does not take sufficient account of the demand-side, structural, causes of unemployment a fact which is likely to lead to difficulties (both in implementation and in the achievement of positive outcomes) in precisely those parts of the country where the need is greatest: high-unemployment areas in the large cities and lagging regions. The author argues, therefore, that particular attention needs to be paid to the emerging geographies of welfare-to-work because, as the New Deal ‘treads down’ differentially into local labour markets around the country, its effects will begin to diverge from those anticipated by national policymakers. In labour-market terms, the programme may even begin to dispense different regulatory functions in relatively depressed compared with buoyant local economies, with institutional containment emerging as the dominant function in the depressed areas and economic coercion the dominant function in buoyant local economies.
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