Alan Milburn’s interim report into young people and work landed in May with a figure the employment support sector cannot ignore. For every £1 the system spends helping a young person into work, it spends around £25 keeping that same young person on benefits. We have built a system far better resourced to manage detachment than to prevent it.
The headline figures are sobering on their own. Nearly one million 16 to 24 year olds in the UK are not in education, employment or training, which is roughly one in eight. The interim report estimates the cost to the country at £125 billion a year, more than we spend on schools. And the shape of the problem has changed. Nearly 60% of NEET young people are now economically inactive, meaning they are not even looking for work, and six in ten have never had a job at all, up from four in ten in 2005.
It would be easy to read those numbers as a story about young people giving up. The report is clear that this is not what is happening. In its own survey, 84% of NEET young people said they want a job, education or training. The ambition is there. What has gone missing is the bridge between that ambition and a first step they can actually take.
Why the barrier to youth employment has changed
For years, the working assumption has been that disengaged young people need to be made more employable. More skills, more CV support, more job search, tighter benefit conditions. Those things have their place. But the report shows they no longer match the problem in front of us.
Health, and mental health in particular, is now a primary driver of who becomes NEET and who stays there. The share of disabled NEET young people citing mental health as their main condition has almost doubled to more than four in ten. Once health related inactivity takes hold it tends to stick. Of those who became economically inactive through ill health between 2017 and 2019, almost eight in ten were still NEET more than two years later.
This is why a confidence first approach matters more than a qualifications first one. The report points out that nearly 30% of NEET young people already have good GCSEs, over a fifth hold a Level 3 qualification, and 15% have a degree. The labour market is simply not absorbing them. When someone is anxious, has never worked, and has been out of the system for months or years, handing them a skills assessment and a job board is starting in the wrong place. Belief has to come before any of that lands. It is a principle we build into our employability solution.
The 314,000 young people we never reach at all
One finding in the report deserves far more attention than it has had. In England in 2023/24, around 314,000 young people aged 18 to 24 were neither in work nor education and were not claiming any benefits either. They are, in the report’s own phrase, out of work and out of sight. No institution is responsible for finding them. No part of the system is measured on whether they are ever reached.
This is the gap that defines the whole challenge. The young people furthest from work are the ones our services are least likely to touch, because almost everything we have built waits for a young person to come to it.. Support that only activates once someone is already engaged will always miss the people who have quietly stopped engaging.
Using the experience the sector already holds
This is where we agree strongly with the response from ERSA and others across the sector. The answer is not to wait for the autumn solutions report and a brand new programme. Providers across the country already hold decades of experience supporting people who are furthest from the labour market. The chance now is to repurpose that support so it meets young people before they hit strict eligibility criteria, rather than after the point where re-engagement becomes hardest and most expensive.
Doing that well means designing for how young people actually behave, not how we wish they would. It means support that copes with someone who misses an appointment and comes back two weeks later, rather than closing their case. It means a small, fast, visible first win that gives someone a reason to return. It means measuring distance travelled, the gain in confidence and readiness, rather than only the job outcome that may be months away. And it means treating technology as a way to extend a good adviser’s reach rather than treating the individual as a quota.
What this looks like in practice
This is the thinking behind Create Your Own Future, our AI supported platform for employment and skills. It is built for the young people the report describes, those who have disengaged the furthest, as well as the ones already standing in the queue. It starts with confidence and self-belief, gives people early momentum, and supports advisers by handling the groundwork so their time goes where it counts, on the human conversations that change minds and heal hearts.
We are already seeing what this can do in practice through the Youth Guarantee and Pilot Trailblazer in Peterborough, where the platform has launched.
Milburn’s interim report is diagnostic. The solutions report comes later this year, and the sector has a real chance to shape it. The £25 to £1 imbalance is not inevitable. It is the result of a system built to manage a problem rather than prevent it, and that is a design choice we can make differently.
Talk to Saffron about youth employment support
If you are a local authority, commissioner or provider working on how to engage young people sooner and shift that spending ratio, we would value the conversation. Get in touch with the Saffron team to see how Create Your Own Future works in practice.
