Alan Milburn, a former Labour Health Secretary, talks about what he has uncovered while writing his major review into Britain’s youth unemployment crisis
A young person told our Review that applying for work felt like shouting into a void.
Dozens of applications. No reply. Automated rejections. Entry level jobs asking for experience they had never been given the chance to get.
They wanted to work. They wanted a routine. They wanted to earn their own money and build a life. But every door seemed to close before anyone had even looked them in the eye. That story is not unusual. It is the experience of too many young people in Britain today.
Nearly one million young people in the UK are not in education, employment or training. One in eight. A country cannot complain about labour shortages, low growth and rising welfare bills while allowing the talent of nearly one million young people to go to waste.
That should shame us. Not because young people lack talent. Not because they lack ambition. But because too many have been left without a proper route into work, confidence and independence.
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The easy answer is to blame young people. To say they are lazy, distracted or entitled. I do not buy it. As part of my Review, I asked Peter Hyman and Shuab Gamote to listen to young people across the country. Not to lecture them. Not to judge them. But to understand what their lives are really like. What they found should make us think again.
There is no shortage of talent or drive. One young person was teaching herself Russian on Duolingo. Another had set up a TikTok business. A third wanted to coach sport and give back to her community. These are not young people who have checked out. They are resilient, thoughtful and bursting with potential.
But they are growing up in circumstances previous generations did not face all at once. A pandemic that shut them away during formative years. Social media designed to hold their attention. A housing market that feels beyond reach. A jobs market that asks for experience before offering anyone the chance to gain it.
None of these pressures is completely new on its own. What is new is the combination. And it is landing on young people at the very moment they are trying to move from childhood into adult life.
Yet too often their behaviour is tracked, polled, debated and judged by people who have never asked them what their lives are actually like. They are called lazy, distracted, entitled.
They are not. Every generation is different from the one before it. The question is not whether young people have changed. Of course they have. The question is whether the systems around them have changed too. This time, they have not.
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Education has not kept pace with the changing needs of young people or employers. The NHS is still too slow to respond to the mental health and other health challenges that stop young people fully participating. And the welfare system, which should help young people at a crucial moment in life, too often manages people outside work rather than helping them take the first step in.
That has to change. The answer is not to write young people off. Nor is it to pretend that ambition alone can overcome every barrier. The answer is to build a system that starts with what young people can do, not just what they cannot.
That means better routes from school into work. Stronger technical and vocational options. Proper work experience. Earlier mental health support. Employers opening more doors. And welfare support that helps young people try work without fear that one failed step will leave them worse off.
Young people have told us what they want. A chance to get a good job. A chance to build a life. A chance to fulfil their potential. They have not given up on work. We must not give up on them.
