The government needs to come up with a less dehumanising term than the ugly acronym “NEETs” to describe a million of our fellow citizens, aged between 18 and 24, who are not in education, employment or training. It is rather symptomatic of the neglect shown towards what is being referred to, equally dismally, as a “lost generation”.
A more accurate term might simply be “young people”, because that is what they are – and the vast majority of those who have found themselves falling behind are in that situation through no fault of their own.
As Alan Milburn’s interim review of what has been going wrong devastatingly reveals, the NEET crisis also represents an obscene waste of human resources. The cumulative cost of young people being out of work, training and education is £125bn a year – more than equal to the amount needed to build the strongest armed forces in Europe.
These young people are not indolent “snowflakes”, cynically manipulating the social security system and inventing mental health problems to avoid earning a living. Mr Milburn has condemned this mythology, and for good reason. He has researched this generation more than anyone else, and spoken to its members, and he knows that they have suffered the sort of distress that few in previous generations have since the world wars of the 20th century.
They have grown up in superficially prosperous times, but also in the age of social media eclipsing real life; they have lived through a global pandemic, alongside the rapid advance of technology, industrial change, the start of the AI revolution, and the consequent rapid disappearance of old-style, “entry level” work.
The qualitative and quantitative research Mr Milburn has conducted has produced a portrait of a generation in crisis. His review is comparable in its authority to the Beveridge Report of 1942, which founded the modern welfare state. That landmark document identified the “five giants” – idleness, ignorance, disease, squalor and want – that were to be slain in the postwar world.
Today, the scourge of poverty, economic exclusion, mental illness and hopelessness among the young stand as the giant social evils of our time.
The many statistics Mr Milburn quotes can be terrifying: for example, half of 16- to 24-year-olds not in work will still be NEET some 15 years later. But this is too often a story of human despair, and of people at the beginning of their lives falling into addiction, homelessness and crime. And needlessly so.
Comparable nations such as Ireland and the Netherlands have much lower NEET rates. It is not inevitable that 10 per cent of Britain’s young should be condemned to lifelong struggle.
Once, in a previous political life, Mr Milburn was considered a suitable “heir to Blair”, albeit one of a number; a man fit to take the New Labour project forward. That never quite happened, but today he has retained that essentially Blairite mentality – looking for solutions that work, wherever they may be found. It is an evidence-based, analytical approach, admirably critical but open-minded.
He rejects, for example, the idea that immigration and the recent increase in employers’ national insurance contributions have dramatically boosted the number of NEETs, because it has been so high for so long, and since well before Rachel Reeves hiked taxes in the last couple of years. But he also sees that some employers have “been on Easy Street” because well-qualified and more experienced immigrant candidates were available.
Mr Milburn also accepts the essential truth that no amount of work on welfare reform, or getting people into technical colleges, will be of use unless the jobs are there. So employers have to take on someone who has never worked before, rather than increasing overtime for existing staff. That means minimising the costs and the risks, which involves setting the minimum wage at a competitive level and avoiding the imposition of punishing national insurance levies and business rates for companies in sectors that used to be rich in “entry level” jobs.
As Mr Milburn’s comprehensive analysis makes clear, it is the country that has let these young people down, rather than the other way round – and catastrophically so. It is simply wrong that prospective employers won’t make the effort to reply to a letter or an email. It would also be in their interests to widen the work-experience opportunities available to young people – precisely because too many recruits aren’t work-ready.
Schools should be incentivised to get their pupils into jobs, training, and further or higher education, looking beyond whatever grades they achieve. Why shouldn’t the NHS be similarly required to refer people to colleges, or to willing employers, to help them out of mental illness and into society? The government’s forthcoming rules on social media should take account of the fact that “pre-NEET” children are doomscrolling until three in the morning, destroying their concentration at school along with their life chances.
The welfare system, above all, should focus less on the classic, Beveridge-era task of income replacement for those who have lost their jobs later in life, and more on using the money to get the young into training or education. By the same token, it cannot be right that, on current trends, some 700,000 young people will be receiving personal independence payments by the year 2030, at a cost of £6bn.
Mr Milburn, if he is determined enough – and if he is able to obtain cross-party and cross-departmental support for his proposals – may be the first person to make a reality of “mission-led” governance.
The analogy he points to is the way in which the triple lock applied to the state pension – originally a wishful detail in the Liberal Democrats’ 2010 manifesto – was adopted first by the Conservatives in the coalition years, then by Labour, and then by everyone else. It has radically reduced pensioner poverty by way of a sustained effort over the decades, through good times and bad.
It can be done. There is hope.