Alan Milburn will warn next week that Britain is facing an economic hit if it does not adapt to the needs of young people who are outside education, work and training, as he prepares to publish an interim report on the country's rising number of Neets. The government's jobs adviser has been asked by prime minister Keir Starmer to examine why almost 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds are not in education, employment or training.
Milburn says businesses must offer more flexibility and mental health support if they want to bring more of those young people into work. He argues that an anxious generation is struggling to fit into an outdated world of work and says firms need to change fast to avoid what he calls an economic catastrophe.
The scale of the problem is stark. The UK has 946,000 Neets, and more than half of them have never worked. A quarter are classed as unable to work because of a long-term sickness or disability, and among that group 43% say mental health problems are the main reason they cannot work. That is up sharply from 24% in 2011. Milburn is expected to say a rising tide of mental ill-health, anxiety, depression and neurodiversity is helping drive the high level of economic inactivity among young people.
His report is also expected to argue that the issue is not only social but economic. Britain has about double the number of Neets as Japan or Ireland and three times as many as the Netherlands, while businesses are struggling to find skilled labour as immigration falls. Net migration dropped to 171,000 last year after peaking at 891,000 in 2022, and Milburn is expected to say that some of those outside the labour market could help fill gaps if they were supported back into work.
Milburn's argument is built around a blunt assessment of how young people now live and work. He says their brains have been rewired by smartphones and that they are different, not worse, not lazier and not less intelligent. In his report, he says they have grown up in a digital world that has changed how they communicate, form relationships and manage stress, while leaving them with fewer experiences of workplaces and higher levels of anxiety and depression. He has also said young people are not snowflakes and that this is an anxious generation.
The former Labour minister is expected to add that the system is trapping people in worklessness rather than enabling them into work, and that Britain risks writing off a whole generation if nothing changes. Peter Hyman, meanwhile, has said schools are becoming a pipeline to worklessness and has called for radical government action, including a social media ban. The report lands next week with a clear test for ministers and employers alike: whether they treat the Neets crisis as a labour-market problem, a health problem, or both.
