Alex Versailles

He was very clearly choked up, very clearly emotional.

He said that himself.

He said he couldn't comment on the sentence as a minister, but I think he made it pretty clear that from his own personal perspective as a dad, that he felt pretty strongly about this as well.

Yeah, and a minister that quite often when he comes across, I think quite deliberately tries to be very efficient and very on the case.

And he likes to talk a lot about the detail of things and show that he's across policy.

And today you saw the human side of him.

And I think whatever you think about politicians, whatever your politics are, and people are always going to fundamentally disagree with some of what politicians say or do, they're people too.

And it was a genuine moment where you got some sort of insight into that this morning.

Well, regardless, just to serve a bit of context, the judge in this case said that he was taking into account the ages of the boys that were involved.

He didn't want to overly criminalise them, but he did point to the seriousness of the offence.

But in your mind, do you think if someone's convicted of rape, they should be in jail?

Yeah, and it sounds like he's going to be quite, I think, strong in what he says in this report from what he's given us an indication of already.

So there is almost a million people who are not in employment, educational training, young people up to the age of 24.

And Alan Milburn told Laura Kunzberg that that is shameful.

He was very critical of...

successive governments and broader society failing to tackle this issue and he was talking about it needing a sort of whole societal approach so he was critical of the education system of the skills provision and training of job opportunities he was talking about a reduction in the number of those kind of entry-level or first stage jobs that there are out there and the impact then this consequently has on those young people that find themselves out of work at a young age and

that a knock on it can have for them and their experience, but also society more broadly.

So the other interesting bit politically it's worth noting is that he was very clear he thinks welfare reform has to be part of this because he came out with a stat which he said the government is spending 25 times as much on welfare benefits for young people as it is on support to help them find work.

And he, in his perspective, that's widely out of kilter.

Well, now there is the key question, right?