Birmingham is “drifting towards disaster” by failing to tackle soaring youth unemployment, a city MP and shadow cabinet member has warned.

Liam Byrne (Lab Hodge Hill), Labour’s Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, is to meet voluntary organisations, business leaders and firms employed to help young people into work, in an effort to find solutions to Birmingham’s youth unemployment “crisis”.

The aim is to bring employers, politicians and other organisations together to find jobs for young people.

Lessons learnt in Birmingham will also be used to help Labour develop policies for tackling youth unemployment nationally.

Mr Byrne said he was prompted to act after a breakdown of official figures, prepared for him by the House of Commons library, showed the number of young people stuck in long-term unemployment had shot up by more than 50 per cent since January.

The statistics show that 4,775 people aged 18 to 24 have been unemployed for six months or longer in Birmingham.

This is up from 3,105 at the start of the year, an increase of 53 per cent.

Mr Byrne said: “What is happening in Birmingham is really disturbing.

He added: “What we know about youth unemployment is that if young people are left on the dole for a long time, they are much more likely to be unemployed again and again over the course of their lifetimes.

“They are much more likely to be low paid and they are much more likely to fall into health problems.

“There is a bucket of evidence that says you’ve really got to work hard to get young people back to work.

“So the fact that city-wide long term youth unemployment rate has gone up at this rate is I think a crisis for the city, and the city needs to pull together to do something about it. We can’t just drift on as we are at the moment.”

In Mr Byrne’s Hodge Hill constituency, long-term youth unemployment has risen from 620 to 865 people, an increase of 39.5 per cent. But the statistics show that young people in wealthier areas of the city are also beginning to face the prospect of life in the dole in significant numbers.

In Sutton Coldfield, the number of young people in long-term unemployment has more than doubled, from 65 to 140, since January.

And in Edgbaston, the figure has very nearly doubled, rising from 195 to 385 people.

Mr Byrne plans to hold a series of meetings with employers, voluntary groups and firms involved in the Government’s Work Programme, which is designed to help the unemployed into jobs.