The UK should identify and track young people at risk of economic inactivity to prevent them slipping out of the workforce, Alan Milburn’s review into youth employment will recommend.
The former Labour health secretary will say that the government must set up locally-led youth services in every community in England, when he delivers his recommendations this month, in a bid to stop teenagers from falling through the cracks.
Just under a million 16- to-24-year olds in the UK (13 per cent) are now classified as ‘Neet’, meaning they are not in education, employment or training, up from a low of 673,000 in 2021.
Earlier this year, Mr Milburn labelled the surge a “whole system failure”. His interim report revealed that 45 per cent of today’s 24-year-old Neets have never had a job, despite 84 per cent saying that they actively want to learn or work.
The state must build a permanent community support network for them, the review will say, pointing to cuts that have hollowed out local services over the past decade.
Council spending on youth services in England fell by 73 per cent between 2010/11 and 2023/24, figures from the YMCA show, while the number of full-time youth workers dropped by 34 per cent over the same period.
Drawing on policies in the Netherlands – where the Neet rate is just 4.1 per cent – the review will urge local authorities to adopt a proactive outreach model where youth workers engage directly with young people in their own neighbourhoods.
Mr Milburn said: “Our youth services have been allowed to wither, meaning too many young people have fallen through the gaps.
“In the Netherlands I saw what works: youth workers who quite literally knock on doors, to make sure young people are getting the help they need to earn or learn.
“Every young person deserves someone who won't give up on them.”
The review will back the government’s National Youth Strategy and its plan to open up to 50 Young Futures Hubs, designed to combine mental health support, career guidance, and a local youth club. However, Mr Milburn will warn that these hubs must form part of a wider local youth system rather than run as standalone programmes.
Abbee McLatchie, acting chief executive at the National Youth Agency, said: “We strongly welcome the recommendations of the Milburn Review and its call for locally led youth services in every area. It recognises something important: rebuilding youth work has to be part of the answer if we want more young people to thrive.
“Where a young person grows up should not determine whether they can access good youth work. Achieving that means rebuilding the local youth system, not simply funding individual programmes, so young people have places to go and people they know and trust.”
Of the 981,000 Neets in Britain, nearly half (45 per cent) are ill or disabled. Other recommendations expected in the review include introducing Danish-style ‘flexi-jobs’, subsidised work for disabled young people, and support for employers to provide workplace adjustments.
Mr Milburn also recently said that the welfare system “isn’t working for young people”, arguing that some money should be redistributed into employment support to end the Neet crisis.
The government has said that it will look at reforms to the welfare system after the publication of Mr Milburn’s review alongside another into the Personal Independence Payment (Pip) by disability minister Stephen Timms, also expected this month.
Chancellor John Healey has insisted that this will not take the form of “crude cuts”, but said last week that he wants to bring the benefits bill down and be “tough” on young people who do not take up an offer to work.
Over 100 Labour MPs threatened to rebel against Sir Keir Starmer’s government last year over planned cuts to welfare, a showdown Mr Healey and new prime minister Andy Burnham will be keen to avoid in drawing up their reforms.
