How serious will the new government be about the Young People and Work Interim Report asks Rebekah Morton?
One in eight young people, those aged 16-24, are not in education, employment or training. Or, as they’ve been irritatingly dubbed, NEETs. A first point in favour of Milburn’s report (the first of many), is that he acknowledges ‘…the ugly phrase “NEET”…’, so that’s a good start.
These patronising acronyms need to stop. If we as young people have to suffer through the experience itself, you older people can suffer through the experience of having to say all six words.
The report released on the 28th May seeks to address the ‘chronic problem’ of youth unemployment, or more deeply, ‘youth detachment from the labour market’.
I will admit, I approached this report with some level of scepticism. As a 23-year-old graduate who was unemployed for over half a year before managing to get a part-time job, I am well and truly fed up with people telling me how important it is that I get into work, how my generation is lazy and unsuited to hard work. I short-sightedly expected more of the same from a government official, but that is not the case with Milburn. As Polly Toynbee said in a recent Guardian article, ‘Perhaps he was expected only to solve the particular problem of left-behind and lost Neets. What he has delivered instead is an excoriating overview of how badly this young generation is treated altogether. A sense of shock reverberates through every well-written page.’
As a generation used to being on the receiving end of criticism from those in governmental positions, this makes a lovely change.
Milburn deftly outlines a crisis that has been skirted around by power for far too long. The employment crisis, bolstered by structural issues and helped along by the dismissive attitudes of older generations, is playing into pre-existing inequalities. ‘What should have been treated as an urgent national crisis has been absorbed into the background noise of public life,’ says Milburn.
The report highlights that successive governments have been unsuccessful in tackling the issue of youth unemployment, leaving us with a “record of failure.” Careers services used to be run by local authorities, an effective tool in the community supporting young people. Over the years, this has been entirely destroyed.
Michael Gove made it the responsibility of schools to provide career guidance while also providing absolutely no funding to see it done. Support for young people leaving education is in shreds.
On top of this, there are no jobs. I know this is a simplification, but it is really how it feels. Most of my more employable friends are currently unemployed. They apply for job after job after job and experience rejection after rejection after rejection.
In this strange world where entry-level jobs seem to require experience, jobs that used to be safe options are no longer hiring. The government and big companies push AI forward and humanity back. Ever being able to own a house seems increasingly unlikely. Social media never gives anyone a minute of peace. We got taken out of the EU with no opportunity to vote on it. The pandemic hit as we tried to transition from school to work or university. The government continually panders to the elderly, and the climate is literally on fire.
How are we supposed to feel about our future?
It’s no surprise then, as Milburn points out, a significant part of health-based inactivity is due to anxiety, depression and other neurodevelopmental conditions. “Young people are different from those who came before them. Not worse. Not lazier. Not less intelligent. But different in ways that have material consequences.” (Milburn 2026)
Milburn does not accept the generalisation of a generation that uses mental health as an excuse, or that is not interested in working. “Young people are not to blame. Institutions that should have provided opportunities to them are the ones that have failed.”
Milburn says there is one clear reason to be optimistic: “the young people themselves. In almost every conversation I had, there was an interest, a passion, a talent just under the surface. Too often those strengths had gone unnoticed and overshadowed by the labels attached to them: absent, anxious, difficult, behind, disabled, care-experienced, NEET.”
As with every instance through human history, people are more than the labels attached to them. ‘Every previous generation was different from the one before it. The systems that existed to transport them from the world of education into the world of work had to adapt. This time, they have not. That is not a failure of young people, but a failure of a system stuck in the past.’
The systems in this country are stuck in the past in many ways. On climate change, on inequality, on education, on employment. The younger generations have been shut out for long enough; the first step to fixing this is further enabling us to participate in the process.