UNEMPLOYMENT may be a national issue, but the scale of the problem in Stoke-on-Trent is threatening to undermine the £2 billion strategy to regenerate the city.

Areas with high unemployment rates tend to have serious social problems, such as crime, deprivation and poor levels of educational attainment which lead to yet more joblessness.

But in parts of Stoke-on-Trent the problem has become an epidemic which has seen dependence on handouts replace the traditional culture of working to earn a living.

Hundreds of families in the city have not worked for three or four generations, and raise children who have no aspirations to improve their situation through learning, training or gong out to work.

Stoke-on-Trent has the 12th highest benefits dependency rate in England, with about 48,000 of the city's 186,000 adults reliant on state handouts to make ends meet.

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The figure includes 19,000 residents receiving incapacity or disability benefits – the highest rate in the West Midlands.

That means that in some areas of the city, almost half the working age population is not in employment, education or training, a group described as NEETs.

The £2 billion strategy to regenerate Stoke-on-Trent and North Staffordshire over the next decade is going to be reliant on skilled workers to transform multi-million-pound schemes such as Hanley's Business District, the University Quarter and the East West Centre from blueprints into reality.

Among the first people to benefit from Kier Stoke's apprenticeship programme is 16-year-old Aaron Worrall, from Bucknall, who is now working and training in the firm's IT department.

He said that despite leaving St Peter's High School with 10 GCSEs, it would have been difficult to find a way into the industry without Kier's help.

"I'm now doing a two-year training course to get an NVQ Level 3," he said. "I'm really enjoying my course and hopefully Kier will keep me on at the end of it.

"My boss is based in Sheffield, so I go up there sometimes, but I also have a mentor here in Stoke and they keep an eye on how I'm doing."

Kier's corporate social responsibility manager, Teresa Jolley, pictured, said that the apprenticeship programme and the vocational training scheme aim to change the whole culture surrounding work in communities which are blighted by worklessness.

She said: "From our work in other parts of the country, such as Sheffield and Leeds, we have gained a lot of experience of working with people who are NEET. In Sheffield we currently deliver more than 2,200 work experience days each year for 14 to 16-year-olds, and we want to introduce that here.

"What we see in areas like Stoke-on-Trent is generational unemployment, where sometimes the young person on our training scheme is the only member of their household who is going out to work each morning."

She added: "Our work is about instilling a work ethic and a way of life which will hopefully change whole communities and make them more sustainable."