The Centre for Social Justice says Britain’s youth worklessness crisis is being fuelled by mass migration, after HMRC payroll data showed 27 young non-EU migrant workers were hired for every additional young British employee since January 2020. The think tank said the number of non-EU workers aged under 25 on UK payrolls rose from 82,000 to 370,000 by December 2025.
The timing matters because Alan Milburn has now set out his interim conclusions on the youth worklessness crisis, and the gap in the labour market has widened again. Between December 2024 and December 2025, non-EU under-25 payroll jobs rose by 33,200 while the number of UK-national under-25s on payrolls fell by 32,200, leaving young British jobseekers facing a market that is moving the wrong way.
CSJ analysis of HMRC payroll data puts the scale of the shift in hard numbers. Since January 2020, the number of non-EU migrants on payrolls aged under 25 has risen by 290,000, a 355 per cent increase, while the young British workforce grew by just 0.3 per cent, or 11,000 people. Over the same period, the number of under-25s not in education, employment or training surged by almost 200,000, to nearly one million 16 to 24-year-olds.
The biggest changes have come in entry-level sectors. In retail and hospitality, non-EU workers of all ages rose by 473,000 between January 2020 and December 2025, while UK nationals employed in those same sectors fell by 252,000. That is the backdrop to the concern among ministers and welfare reformers: the jobs that once gave young people their first break are no longer absorbing them in the same way.
Joe Shalam said Milburn had “powerfully exposed the scandal of nearly one million young people being left without work or training,” but added that the labour market itself also has to be part of the answer. He said poor mental health, access to benefits and weak employment support are all part of the problem, but argued that almost half a million more non-EU migrants employed in retail and hospitality since 2020 has helped fuel the crisis, with starter roles “simply vanishing” as employers face rising costs.
That is the friction in the story: youth worklessness is not explained by one cause, and the CSJ knows it. Its Wasted Youth report calls on ministers to ease the burden on employers hiring young Brits through a Future Workforce Credit worth 30 per cent of a NEET’s salary, tighten health-related benefits for some young people, redirect savings into NHS talking therapies, employment support and vocational routes, and bring back the Resident Labour Market Test, which once required employers to advertise vacancies domestically before turning to visa schemes. The unanswered question now is how much of the damage can be reversed by labour-market rules alone, and how much depends on fixing the health and support systems that have left so many young people outside work in the first place.
