Jobs vacancies posted on a government website as part of Esther McVey’s initiative to offer summer employment for young people have been advertised as paying as little as £2 an hour.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph last week, the work and pensions secretary said that her intention was to “restore the merits that summer jobs can bring” and advertised the website as the place for young people to start looking for vacancies. But the website, Find A Job, was advertising posts that paid below the national minimum wage, some jobs were being portrayed as apprenticeships and some involved zero-hour contracts.

Hours after The Times alerted the Department for Work and Pensions to the adverts, they disappeared from the site. A spokesman for the department said