Nearly one million 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK are not in education, employment, or training. By 2031, that number could reach 1.25 million — one in six young people. A landmark government-commissioned review published this week warns of a “lost generation“: young people locked out of work not by their own failure, but by institutions that were never designed to help them. The NEET crisis is not a youth problem. It is a system problem — and the system has known this for years.
The Numbers, and What They Hide
At the end of 2025, 957,000 young people in the UK were NEET. In the last 25 years, the rate has only once fallen below 10% — during the pandemic, when furlough temporarily suppressed unemployment. It has since reversed sharply, reaching its highest level in a decade.
The headline figure understates the problem’s depth. Over 6 in 10 NEET young people have never had a job, up from 4 in 10 in 2005. Nearly 60% are not just out of work — they are not looking for work. And of those who fell into health-related inactivity between 2017 and 2019, almost 8 in 10 were still NEET more than two years later. The crisis is not cyclical. It is not responding to economic improvement the way youth unemployment once did. It has become structural and sticky.
In 2014, the UK’s NEET rate was around the European average. By 2025, only Romania recorded a higher rate. The Netherlands’ rate for 15 to 24-year-olds now stands at 4.1%. The UK’s is 12.8%. These are not marginal differences.
What Changed — and When
The review, led by former health secretary Alan Milburn, is careful not to offer a single explanation. But one stands out. The proportion of NEET young people who are inactive due to a work-limiting health condition has increased by 70% over the past decade. The proportion of disabled NEETs citing mental health as their primary condition has almost doubled to more than four in ten.
Between 2017 and 2023, the proportion of children and young people in England with a mental disorder rose from 12% to 20%. Once health-related inactivity takes hold, it sticks. For the first time in perhaps two centuries, changes in health — especially mental health — are impeding economic growth and causing a contraction in the supply of labour.
The labour market has also changed. Entry-level roles have become less plentiful and more demanding. Recruitment has become more remote, more automated and less human. The young person who might once have walked into a shop, spoken to a manager and been given a chance is now screened by a portal, a test, a recorded interview or an algorithm before anyone has looked them in the eye. Apprenticeship starts for young people have declined by over 40%. The first rungs on the career ladder have not disappeared. They have been pulled up.
“This Is Just the End”
The most important chapter in the Milburn report is not the data. It is the testimony. The review team spent months with young people across the country — in Newcastle, Belfast, Cardiff, Bradford, Clacton — and what they heard was not laziness or entitlement. It was exhaustion, rejection, and the slow accumulation of failures by institutions that should have intervened.
A young woman in Belfast, after leaving school without the qualifications she needed, was simply “never told what to do next. So I kind of just stayed in the house, and I was like, right, well, this is just the end.”
A young man in Newcastle said he had applied for over 60 to 70 jobs. A young woman in Camden applied for around 50 roles over one summer, heard back from ten, and was rejected by all ten without explanation. The most consistent complaint was not rejection but silence — because at least rejection gave them something to work with.
In our survey, 84% of NEET young people said they want to find a job, education or training. The challenge is not a lack of aspiration. It is a shortage of opportunities and a system that does not reliably help them find the ones that exist.
The Architecture Is the Problem
The review’s central diagnosis is institutional. Britain has organisations for young people — schools, colleges, Jobcentres, health services, welfare — but it does not have a system. Responsibility is dispersed across many organisations with no shared accountability and no clear governing philosophy. A school is recognised, regulated and rewarded for examination results, not on where the student ends up. Health services are rewarded for activity but not outcomes. The welfare system measures incapacity. It does not plan for capability.
In England alone in 2023/24, around 314,000 18 to 24-year-olds were neither in work nor in education and were not receiving benefits. They are out of work and out of sight. No institution is responsible for finding them or helping them.
The geography of failure is not even. In Blackpool, almost a quarter of young people are NEET. In Bath, the rate is less than one in ten. A young person facing identical risk factors will have worse outcomes in Hartlepool than in Harrogate — not because of anything they have done differently, but because the local economy produces fewer opportunities and local public services face more demands.
What Comes Next
The government responded the day after publication with a pledge of 300,000 new youth work placements. The Milburn review itself does not yet contain solutions — it is an interim diagnostic report, with recommendations due later this year.
The diagnosis is already damning enough. The cumulative annual cost of almost one million NEET young people stands at £125 billion — more than the UK spends on education each year. Of today’s 24-year-old NEETs, 45% have never had a job. Even if they re-enter the labour market, they will lose an estimated £300,000 in earnings over their lifetime as a result.
As explored in “Britain Is Not Moving Right. It Is Moving Away,” the local election results this month reflected a public that has run out of patience with institutions that know a problem exists and keep deferring the response. The NEET crisis is one version of that pattern — played out over twenty-five years, absorbed as background noise, and finally given a name. The question the final report will have to answer is whether the architecture can actually change, or whether another set of programmes gets layered on top of a system that was never designed to help the people it is supposed to serve.
Key Sources
- UK Government / Department for Work and Pensions, “Young people and work: interim report” (Milburn Review), 28 May 2026: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/young-people-and-work-interim-report/young-people-and-work-interim-report
- Reuters, “UK pledges 300,000 youth placements after ‘lost generation’ warning”: https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/uk-pledges-300000-youth-placements-after-lost-generation-warning-2026-05-28/
- The Independent, “Youth unemployment crisis costing UK £125bn a year”: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/neet-youth-employment-alan-milburn-report-b2985009.html
- BBC News, “Opportunities shrinking for too many young people, says major report”: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy026x9jpd0o
- The Telegraph, “Britain faces ‘lost generation’ as number of Neets heads for 1.25m”: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/05/27/britain-faces-lost-generation-youth-worklessness/
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