Firms urged to hire UK jobless not foreign workers

(BBC): UK businesses should recruit more unemployed young Britons rather than relying on labour from abroad, the work and pensions secretary is to say. In a speech in Spain, Iain Duncan Smith will say that if government policy has prepared young people for work, "we need businesses to give them a chance". Otherwise, he will say, they will be lost to dependency and hopelessness. Official figures suggest almost 90% of the 400,000 jobs created in the UK in the past year went to foreign workers.In 2007, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown pledged to create "British jobs for British workers". But he was widely criticised when it emerged that about 80% of the jobs created in the UK under Labour went to foreign migrants.

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