Milburn’s NEET review deserves cross-party support

The government needs to come up with a less dehumanising term than the ugly acronym “NEETs” to describe a million of our fellow citizens, aged between 18 and 24, who are not in education, employment or training. It is rather symptomatic of the neglect shown towards what is being referred to, equally dismally, as a “lost generation”.

A more accurate term might simply be “young people”, because that is what they are — and the vast majority of those who have found themselves falling behind are in that situation through no fault of their own, according to The Independent.

As Alan Milburn’s interim review of what has been going wrong devastatingly reveals, the NEET crisis also represents an obscene waste of human resources. The cumulative cost of young people being out of work, training and education is £125b a year — more than equal to the amount needed to build the strongest armed forces in Europe.

These young people are not indolent “snowflakes”, cynically manipulating the social security system and inventing mental health problems to avoid earning a living. Mr Milburn has condemned this mythology, and for good reason. He has researched this generation more than anyone else, and spoken to its members, and he knows that they have suffered the sort of distress that few in previous generations have since the world wars of the 20th century.

They have grown up in superficially prosperous times, but also in the age of social media eclipsing real life; they have lived through a global pandemic, alongside the rapid advance of technology, industrial change, the start of the AI revolution, and the consequent rapid disappearance of old-style, “entry level” work.

The qualitative and quantitative research Mr Milburn has conducted has produced a portrait of a generation in crisis. His review is comparable in its authority to the Beveridge Report of 1942, which founded the modern welfare state. That landmark document identified the “five giants” – idleness, ignorance, disease, squalor and want – that were to be slain in the postwar world.

Today, the scourge of poverty, economic exclusion, mental illness and hopelessness among the young stand as the giant social evils of our time.

The many statistics Mr Milburn quotes can be terrifying: for example, half of 16- to 24-year-olds not in work will still be NEET some 15 years later. But this is too often a story of human despair, and of people at the beginning of their lives falling into addiction, homelessness and crime. And needlessly so.

Comparable nations such as Ireland and the Netherlands have much lower NEET rates. It is not inevitable that 10 per cent of Britain’s young should be condemned to lifelong struggle.

Once, in a previous political life, Mr Milburn was considered a suitable “heir to Blair”, albeit one of a number; a man fit to take the New Labour project forward. That never quite happened, but today he has retained that essentially Blairite mentality — looking for solutions that work, wherever they may be found. It is an evidence-based, analytical approach, admirably critical but open-minded.

He rejects, for example, the idea that immigration and the recent increase in employers’ national insurance contributions have dramatically boosted the number of NEETs, because it has been so high for so long, and since well before Rachel Reeves hiked taxes in the last couple of years. But he also sees that some employers have “been on easy street” because well-qualified and more experienced immigrant candidates were available.