Burnham will stand or fall on his plans for youth employment: he must put the next generation first | Polly Toynbee

Labour has to match the success of its New Deal for young people in the late 1990s – and remedy the injustices that have led to a ‘lost generation’

Today a new programme starts to help the million unemployed young people not in education or training (Neets). By chance, it launches on the day Andy Burnham set out to paint a picture of his horizons with plans that put the young first, closely matching Alan Milburn’s searing review of the fate of a “lost generation”.

As from now, any employer can claim £3,000 in a youth jobs grant to take on an 18- to 24-year-old who has been on universal credit and looking for work for at least six months. That financial incentive for employers will be well complemented by Burnham’s devolution revolution. The Burnham remedy is a great shift of power, funds and taxes out of Whitehall into the hands of local mayors, because local is where jobs are, locally is where education and further education succeed or fail and locality is all too often where disadvantage blights children’s future. Burnham’s confidence that the local works best for unemployment comes from the success of his Manchester “working well” programme, which has outstripped national schemes.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist