This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Armchair Economics with Hamish McRae, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

Sainsbury’s has just launched a plan to give 10,000 young people work experience opportunities to help them “develop skills, build confidence and gain insight into future careers”. Andy Burnham thinks it’s a great idea, and he’s probably right.

Our new Prime Minister said: “I encourage more businesses across the country to do the same. Access to opportunity and work experience shouldn’t depend on who you know; it should be within reach for every young person wherever they live – and that’s what I’m determined to deliver.”

The background of the rising numbers of young people not in education, employment or training (Neets) has been widely reported. It’s a huge global problem, as the International Labour Organisation recently reported.

While the UK is by no means top – or perhaps it’s better to say the bottom – of the global league table here, we now have a higher proportion of Neets than the EU average, whereas a decade ago we were lower. The worrying point here is that while our overall unemployment level is lower than the EU (though higher than the US), our youth unemployment rate is over 16 per cent and heading in the wrong direction.

What’s to be done? There are really two ways of tackling this and we probably need both.

The Sainsbury’s initiative is a great example of the first: show young people what work is really like, coach them on how to present themselves, build their confidence, and so on. Ten thousand is a decent number to take on, and if other companies pitch in, you could envisage the total being 10 or 20 times that total. But there are now more than a million Neets in........

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