A new campaign has been launched to offer unemployed young people the same opportunity to develop their leadership skills as those who are in employment.

The ‘Young Million’ campaign by international leadership development organisation Common Purpose has been set up in response to figures from the Office for National Statistics that showed around 1m young people in the UK were unemployed, including 20 per cent of graduates.

There are many schemes that exist to help these young people find employment, the organisation said, yet few that offer the training and development opportunities they would have received from employers were they in work.

Sir David Bell, non-executive director of The Economist, said: “The rise in youth unemployment shames us all. But there are concrete things we can do to stop this awful waste of young talent and young lives; and we must do them.”