WHEN the situation has been described as an emergency, any glint of progress is welcome – and so it is with youth unemployment.

Not so long ago, the awful headlines told of one million young people not in education, employment or training – or NEET, as they say – as jobs disappeared.

The talk was of a 1980s-style “lost generation”

and warnings that young people were heading for the scrapheap, their lives blighted.

Well, tread carefully, but the darkest days are behind us and the Government has a better story to tell as the General Election nears.

The latest figures show 16.8 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds in the North-East were ‘NEET’ in the first quarter of this year, a total of 54,000. That’s around one in every six, which doesn’t sound very impressive, but it is a fall of 11,000, or almost three per cent, on the same period last year.

Compare it with the depths of the recession, when 73,000 North-East youngsters - or close to one in four – were classed as NEET and the progress is clear.

And the picture is the same in Yorkshire, where the proportion of NEETs has dropped from 23.8 per cent to 14 per cent, over the past three years.

There is also hope for 16 to 18-year-old NEETs. Take County Durham, which counted 1,810 (10.4 per cent) kicking their heels in 2012, but only 1,250 (7.1 per cent) at the end of last year.

So what has explains this improvement?

Well, I think we can discount the Government’s ‘Youth Contract’ for the young jobless, which had terrible figures the last time I looked. Ministers are keen to claim the credit, arguing their changes are giving young people “the right skills for the job market”.

Possibly, but it’s more plausible that local councils and their partner organisations have successfully stepped up one-to-one efforts to get youngsters into further education or training.

Councils have also become much better – after Government threats – at tracking young people, who used to disappear off their radar.

However, before anyone gets carried away, there is a long, long way to go – especially in the North-East which still has the country’s highest proportion of NEETs. Even comparing the UK as a whole, the record remains truly dismal next to many European Union neighbours. Even now, 13.5 per cent of 16 to 24-year-olds are at risk of forming that “lost generation”, so many more than in Germany (7.1 per cent) or the Netherlands (4.3 per cent).

Careers advice in schools appears to have gone from dreadful to appalling in recent years and vocational qualifications are still treated as second best. Nevertheless, things are getting better.

THE planned new hospital at Wynyard Park was rejected because it was to be built with cash – and, now, it might be rejected because it involves PFI. That’s what Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said, the same Mr Hunt who recently handed over £420m for a new hospital in Brighton. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Wynyard Park would be built by now, if it wasn’t a North-East project.