Everyone is seeking to put down their markers before the manifestos appear and the press conferences start to roll. TAEN’s member newsletter, just published, gives some prompts for attendees at hustings or callers to election phone in programmes.

In similar vein, last week TAEN arranged an event with the Social Market Foundation, which included speakers from each of the main parties. They outlined their thoughts on the question of Who’s hurting and what’s working? Tackling unemployment after the recession.  Our focus was, of course, on the age skew of much that has gone before.

Yvette Cooper, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, put the case for the Government whilst Lord Freud spoke for the Conservatives and Professor Steve Webb carried the banner of the Liberal Democrats.

A report will appear shortly on this website so I will eschew rehashing speeches in favour of a more impressionistic narrative that befits the blogger’s art.

Time and place say so much. Our conference was in a former bus garage turned business centre, nestling close to Kennington Park. I recalled visiting the premises next door many years previously when Kenneth Baker, Secretary of State for Education (now Lord Baker), had established one of his information technology centres (ITecs).

The ITecs offered skills training in information technology to unemployed youngsters, a great idea at the time and one that worked too, but suddenly they were no longer the flavour of the month.

I wrote a pamphlet standing up for them, as I remember. Somehow it all fitted with the short termism and lack of determination to see things through that our jobs, skills and welfare policies suffered from in those days

I shared a different memory with the conference, of a “Gi’ us a job” type of demo which ended in the park opposite our meeting. A small column of marchers trailed through the South London employment black spots to hear speeches from the outraged. (I still have one of the posters somewhere with names from the past.)

So I didn’t need convincing of the pitiless waste of young people denied opportunity to work. Most of our speakers seemed to recognise things have been better this recession with the Future Jobs Fund, the jobs promise and schemes like the graduate internship programme.  But they also concurred that the time had come for more emphasis on the 50+ cohort.

It is timely to remember how cruel previous recessions have been to older workers. The 1980s recession raised unemployment permanently among older men as industrial restructuring swept through our economy like a demolition ball. Between 1979 and 1985 the employment rate for men fell by 17.5 per cent; for older women it was just 3.5 per cent.

In the 1990s, the figures were less severe. Women’s employment rates actually increased between 1990 and 1993, but men’s employment fell by 8.2 per cent. This time around, women have again done better than men with employment rates actually rising very slightly at 0.3 per cent, while men’s employment has dropped 2.6 per cent.

That said, there is no doubt that older workers are finding it much harder to recover from unemployment in this recession as they have in the past. Thirty-one per cent of all workers made redundant get jobs within three months. Amongst 16-24 year olds, 30 per cent have recovered jobs in this time but only 19 per cent have done so in the 50 to state pension age range.

So while the Government’s age specific measures for younger workers have helped, the absence of such measures aimed at older workers has had a noticeable impact.

The Government woke up to this at the end of last year and published a series of new measures in its White Paper Building Britain’s recovery: achieving full employment. The Government knows that, despite the Age Regulations, older workers face ubiquitous age discrimination.

They know too that older workers are less likely to have up-to-date qualifications when seeking a job. And they know that with the crisis in pensions, losing jobs right now can have a profound impact on families for years to come.

Moreover, the Government knows that if older workers drop out of the labour market now when finding a job is so hard, they are likely to remain out of work for that much longer – and probably become unwillingly retired.

We agree with them on all this. And we welcomed too the new measures in December’s White Paper. But bright ideas are one thing, implementing them is another.

We said at the time that retraining for Jobcentre Plus staff, the new adult advancement and careers service, early access to the six months offer of enhanced support, and more training and subsidies for those who wished to become self employed were all good things.

Now for the hard bit, however. Yvette Cooper announced that the money to put these measures into practice had now been found… a further £10 million would be put into making them work.

Pardon my scepticism but this doesn’t sound much for all they want to achieve.

We live in hope, but I thought I saw the face of Baron Baker of Dorking smiling from the shadows of the bus garage. Perhaps it was just a chimera of promises which evaporate on exposure to the light of day.

I hope not, but I can tell you that when policies fail and no one is listening, resorting to marches through the streets is a hard way to make a point.