A former Labour cabinet minister has published a major review into youth unemployment, laying bare the scale of the crisis affecting Britain’s young people.
Alan Milburn, the author of the report, warned of a “whole system failure” and called for an urgent plan for change to mitigate the risk of a “lost generation” emerging.
The government-commissioned report came as new figures published on Thursday showed the number of young people neither working nor learning has topped one million for the first time since 2013.
Here, The Independent runs through the report’s key findings and most shocking statistics relating to the crisis facing young people.
UK youth unemployment costing £125bn a year
The UK’s youth unemployment crisis is costing the country around £125 billion a year, more than the country spends on education and almost double the defence budget.
The sum, said to take in losses in taxes alongside higher health and welfare spending, is also more than annual education spending in England and could rise if the situation worsens, the interim report suggested.
One in six young people may not be in education, training or employment by 2031
The Office for National Statistics said the number of people aged between 16 and 24 and not in employment, education or training, so-called Neets, rose to 1.01 million in the three months from January to March.
But Mr Milburn’s review has estimated this number could rise from 1 in 8 to 1 in 6 young people by 2031, affecting 1.25 million young people if steps are not taken to solve the problem.
Sharp decline in the number of entry level jobs
The report laid bare the scale of the decline in the number of entry level jobs, saying there are 1.6 million fewer low and medium skilled jobs in the economy than in previous decades.
It also warned that vacancies in hospitality have halved in the past four years alone, while Saturday jobs are also on the decline. Meanwhile, the number of people taking up apprenticeship has fallen by 35 per cent over the past decade.
“The first rung of the career ladder has thinned. For too many young people it is now simply out of reach. That places them in a hopeless Catch-22 where employers ask for work experience but the opportunities for young people to gain it have narrowed or gone,” Mr Milburn said.
For every £25 spent on benefits, just £1 was spent on employment support
The report exposes a fundamental imbalance in how public money is spent. In 2024/25, for every £1 spent on employment support for young people, around £25 was spent on benefits.
The report states: “The gateway, once entered, becomes a one-way valve. The system is growing. Its purpose is not changing. It pays for the problem. It does not solve it.”
Its conclusion says: “Nearly one million young people are outside education and work. They are not a statistic. They are the sons and daughters of this country. Some were identified as at risk before they could read. The system knew. It watched. It documented. It published reports. It commissioned evaluations. It launched pilots. It let the funding expire. And it moved on.”
Mr Milburn told the BBC that the benefits system “can’t just be a safety net” for young people, adding: “It’s got to be a springboard. It’s got to provide more opportunities for people to get work experience, to get a first taste of a job.”
Anxiety linked to social media is driving economic inactivity
The former Labour Cabinet minister warned of a “bedroom generation”, saying that anxiety linked to social media is driving economic inactivity among young people.
“The system is trapping people in worklessness rather than enabling them into work,” the former Labour Cabinet minister told the Times ahead of the report’s publication. “We’re at a risk of just writing a whole generation off.
“This is a bedroom generation. They are sort of living in their bedrooms. They are on all the time, they’re never off. [Social media] is leading to some evidence of functional impairment, changing their sleep patterns, concentration levels. That is having an impact on their ability to work.
“They are not snowflakes. People say it’s a soft generation. My view unequivocally is that it isn’t. It is an anxious generation.”
It came as the ONS said that the latest figures on youth unemployment were driven by “greater numbers of young people no longer looking for work.”
Government has neither a system or plan to deal with crisis, Milburn says
Mr Milburn warned the UK faces a “generational fault line”, blaming a lack of entry level jobs caused by a “failure of a system stuck in the past”.
“It’s one thing to be ignorant about it, it’s quite another to be neglectful, and I’m sad to say that far too long in our country the Neet crisis has been swept under the rug…today Britain faces a genuine generational of fault line we do not just have a chronic problem it is getting worse not getting better and we have neither a system or a plan to deal with it”, he said.
