I am 20 and I've been out of work for a while now and in receipt of Universal Credit. Not because I don't want a job, but because as a young person I am struggling to get the chance to prove I can do one. It is really difficult to get a job and most of them are requiring to have significant more experience than I have. How am I meant to get experience if no one will give me the opportunity to get some?

So when Opening Shift came along, offering placements at places like Tesco, Asda, M&S and Greggs, it sounded like a way in. A first step to building professional experience.

Then I found out what the "step" actually is: it's unpaid labour. It's doing the real shifts, stacking shelves, serving customers, cleaning for sixteen to thirty five hours a week - with no pay from the retailer for any of it. Just Universal Credit, which is meant to help me get by while I look for work, not cover a shift I've already worked.

At the end, there's no promise of a job, just a potential interview interview. So I could do four weeks of unpaid shifts and still walk away with nothing but a pat on the back.

This isn't something retailers dreamed up on their own, this is how the Department for Work and Pensions designed the scheme. They built the rule that lets our "working" count as jobseeking instead of work.

I'm not lazy, and I want to work. I'm one of a million young people in this country who've never had the chance to prove ourselves, and I don't think the answer to that is a government scheme that asks us to prove it for free.