Nick Clegg gives a master class in Indian Bicycle Marketing

Exhibit One from The Deputy Prime Minister's Office, April 2012:

Helping young people into work through the Youth Contract

We introduced a £1 billion Youth Contract in April 2012 to help young unemployed people get a job. The Youth Contract is a range of support to make it easier for businesses to give young unemployed people a job, training or work experience.

It will provide nearly half a million new opportunities for 18 to 24 year olds, including apprenticeships and voluntary work experience placements.

Exhibit Two, from Personnel Today, 25 June 2013:

A survey of 200 employers has found that the government has failed to win their support for the coalition's flagship policy for tackling youth unemployment, the Youth Contract. None of the employers polled by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation (REC) had used the programme to employ a young person to date.

Nearly half (46%) of respondents, who have responsibility for hiring decisions at their organisation, confirmed they had heard of the scheme, but did not intend to use it, and almost one in three (30%) were "not aware" of the Youth Contract.

Exhibit Three, from an inteview with the self-same Deputy Prime Minister in Lib Dem Voice, 24 June 2013:

We’ve got a much bigger issue, which is a generational issue as we all know, which is that the squeeze has fallen harder on the shoulders of the younger generation.

That’s why I’ve come to the view that one of the urgent bits of work we need to do both in government and more widely is look at the way in which we support particularly that generation of 16-24 year olds, the education-into-work group, who are very poorly served at the moment by a hotchpotch of different and often conflicting government initiatives which are very confusing, a pea-soup of acronyms, and the money is not well spent.

One of my top priorities over this summer is to really get to grips with this, because we’re spending hundreds of millions of pounds as a society and we’re not serving them well at all.

Emailed in by BobE.