Neglect is a political choice, and one with deep human consequences.
That is what has struck me in the early months as secretary of state for work and pensions. Graph after graph, slide after slide, all pointing upwards, on young people out of work, on mental health issues among the population, and on the decision by default as much as design that the response should be benefits rather than changing lives.
Is this response good enough? It can keep body and soul together but it doesn’t change lives. People don’t live in a spreadsheet. There are human consequences to growing youth inactivity as well as financial ones. The number of young people not in education, employment or training (Neet) grew by almost 50% between 2021 and 2024. The proportion is highest in the north-east and north-west of England, followed by the East and West Midlands, and those citing sickness and mental health problems has increased by 76% since 2019. Doing nothing would be to continue the pattern.
Former John Lewis chair Charlie Mayfield – who headed our Keep Britain Working review – has found that a young person on benefits loses out on around £1m in earnings over their lifetime and it costs the state a similar amount to support them. The work aspirations study published earlier this year showed that a majority of people on health and disability benefits suffer from low self-esteem and sense of worth.
The bottom line is, we invest too much in failure and not enough in changing lives.
And this is compounded by technological change in the labour market. Talk to any group of teenagers right now and you will find a high degree of concern and awareness about the impact of artificial intelligence and what it might do to jobs. Our task is not to hide from technology that is already here, but to try to position the UK as a welcome home for its use and development. AI will both destroy and create jobs, and our ambition should be to make sure it does more of the latter.
Nor should we be insular in how we view this. Other countries face similar issues with Neets, but many have attacked the problem with much more vigour than we have, and have a far lower percentage of young people not in training or employment than we do. In the Netherlands, the proportion is just under 4% – around a third of the UK level. Germany’s rate is 8% – higher than the Netherlands but lower than the UK’s. There is nothing inevitable about having one in eight young people in this position.
We have made a start on a new response here in the UK, by announcing a youth guarantee backed by £820m in funding to offer training, work experience and subsidised employment to young people out of work.
On top of that, we will stop the decline in apprenticeships for young people, which have fallen by nearly 40% in starts over the past decade. Instead, we will make an explicit priority of apprenticeships for young people in our funding, and guarantee to pay all the training costs of their apprenticeships for small- and medium-sized businesses. And we will offer more short courses – known as sector-based work academy programmes – in priority areas that employers say they need.
These steps form the biggest statement in years that the government wants to back young people and give them hope, rather than attacking them as shirkers and snowflakes.
But to bring the Neets numbers down further, we will have to go further. That is why I have asked the former health secretary Alan Milburn to report on the issue of young people, inactivity and work next year.
His task starts today, and is made more urgent as the numbers of young people reporting long-term sickness grow. The system the Tories built has produced the consequences we see now – offering claimants a choice between penury and being declared unfit for work. We need to change it – to move on from the neglect that has allowed the current pattern to take hold, and instead offer a policy answer that gives young people more hope for the future. The prize in changing course could be enormous for the young people involved, and for the country.
