Marc Bolland has been brought in by the government to help get more young people into work after a review warned that Britain could lose a generation to joblessness. He will work with business leaders to expand opportunities for young people and advise Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden on how the government should respond.
The move lands as more than one million young people are not in education, employment or training, the highest level in more than 12 years. For ministers, that is no longer a warning light on a dashboard but a crisis large enough to demand a familiar face with boardroom experience and charity credentials.
Bolland is not stepping in as a stranger to the problem. He founded Movement to Work in 2012 in response to the previous year's riots, and the charity has since helped more than 200,000 disadvantaged young people into work. He has also led Marks & Spencer, served as chief executive of Morrisons and was chief operating officer at Heineken, giving him a rare mix of corporate and workforce experience.
The review that prompted the appointment painted a bleak picture of the labour market for 16- to 24-year-olds. It found that one in six young people is on track to be out of work, education or training in five years unless action is taken, even though 84% of the Neet young people surveyed said they want a job or training. It also found that six in 10 of them have never had a job.
That gap matters because it shows the problem is not simply a lack of interest. Young people are saying they want in, but too many are starting from zero, with no work history and few obvious routes into a first role. Alan Milburn, who led the review, put the point bluntly: opportunities for too many young people are not growing, they are shrinking.
The government says some of the UK's biggest businesses will back 300,000 work experience and training placements over the next three years, and Bolland's job is to turn that pledge into something that reaches the people counted in the Neet figures. The open question now is whether business support can be translated quickly enough into real jobs and training places for the young people who have already been left waiting.
