Swindon jobseeker

Nineteen-year-old Hanna Evans, from Swindon, is one of the new faces of unemployment.

Figures released recently show almost one in five young people under the age of 24 are now out of work: that's just under a million people.

Nineteen-year-old Hanna Evans, from Swindon, is one of them.

She's been unemployed for a year - in a town which famously used to have more jobs than people wanting them.

She hates it, but is undeterred - and has been tramping the streets of her home town, with the now infamous placard, touting for work.

"I've tried the internet, tried going round town, handing my CV in: no luck. This is my last resort."

When we hooked her up with the Employment Minister Chris Grayling, he gave the stock answer - blaming Labour for the deficit, the recession and lack of jobs.

But the government has promised to help, lengthening work placements from two to eight weeks before benefits kick in.

And one of the town's two Tory MPs, Rob Buckland, told the BBC Politics Show on Sunday: "It's been a problem in Swindon for the last couple of years. It was badly hit by the recession in 07/08 - but is slowly coming out of that.

"The good news for people like Hanna is that the government recognises there are too many barriers to employment for young people. We need to be encouraging the kind of apprentice and mentoring schemes which don't really on too much paper work."

Much more on those measures in future Politics Shows.

What's interesting here though are the historical parallels.

Rewind to 1992 and the last economic slump.

We filmed Phil Rice, also from Wiltshire, putting his CV under posh car windscreens after being made redundant.

He's now working for Malmesbury Town Council, having found a job three months after making his desperate plea.

"I wish Hanna all the best. When I saw what she'd done on the news, I thought good for you and it brought it all back to me. It must be murder getting into employment nowadays and tough for years to come."

Hanna will be hoping she'll make a breakthrough - she's just lined up a few job interviews.

The economy picked up for Phil Rice in 1993: will it do the same this time round?

Many employers are only taking people on part-time, leaving those on benefits unsure about the value of coming off them for temporary work.

The government has promised to solve this eternal conundrum with the Universal Benefit - but will those reforms come too late for Hanna's generation?

If so, the pictures of Hanna touting for a job could come back to haunt the coalition.