Almost a million young people in Britain are now not in education, employment or training. At around one in eight 16 to 24-year-olds, that is among the worst rates in Europe.
But the number isn’t the interesting part. The shape of the problem has changed. This is no longer about young people losing jobs. It is about them never getting one in the first place. Six in ten NEET young people today have never worked at all; twenty years ago it was four in ten. So the question isn’t why young people stopped working. It’s why so many of them never started.
The easy answer is that something has gone wrong with them. Gen Z are “lazy”. Gen Z are “snowflakes” but the evidence doesn’t support this sentiment. Most of NEET young people told the Milburn review they want work, education or training, and 40% already hold qualifications at A-level or above. These are not people who have opted out. They are people who cannot find a way in.
What has actually changed is the bottom of the labour market. Milburn’s review found 1.6 million fewer low and medium skilled jobs in the economy than in previous decades, hospitality vacancies halved in four years, and apprenticeships went down by around a third over the past decade. The Saturday job in a shop or a café which was never really about the money, but was about learning how a workplace works before anyone expects you to perform in one was disappearing for two decades before the pandemic finished it off for an entire cohort. Young people describe applying for dozens, sometimes hundreds of roles and getting silence back. Employers ask for experience but the jobs that used to provide it have gone. This is the typical catch-22.
So why are jobs decreasing? Employers point to cost. Its simply getting more expensive to hire.Talk to anyone running a small business and they’ll tell you the maths has changed. Employer National Insurance has gone up, and a lot of firms are coping by hiring fewer people. The Low Pay Commission doesn’t think higher wages are what’s hurting young workers, and it might be right. But arguing over the cause misses the point. When there are fewer jobs to go round, employers play it safe and hire the person who’s done it before. The eighteen-year-old with a blank CV doesn’t lose out because anyone’s set out to exclude them. They lose out because nobody’s willing to take the chance.
Then the system intervenes in the worst possible way. The share of NEET young people whose primary work-limiting condition is mental health has risen sharply since 2011, and a diagnosis has become an entry point into the health and welfare system rather than a route back out of it. Eventhough most young NEETs would rather see themselves in fulfilling job roles, sometimes for a young person with a health condition, inactivity can pay better and carry less risk than job-seeking. In 2024/25, for every £1 the DWP spent on employment support for young people, around £25 went on cash benefits. The system pays for the problem. It does not solve it.
To its credit, the government has seen this. The Youth Guarantee £820 million at the Autumn Budget, with a further £1 billion in March is the most serious attempt at the problem in a decade.
The Jobs Guarantee fully funds six months of paid work at minimum wage for 18 to 24-year-olds after 18 months on Universal Credit, and a Youth Jobs Grant pays employers £3,000 to take on a young person after six months. This sort of initiative is exactly what we need to encourage employers to take a chance with young people. That is a real offer, not a gesture, and it attacks the right thing: the missing first rung of the employment ladder. But it reaches people through the claims system, and a large share of NEET young people aren’t on benefits.They haven’t been failed by the scheme.They are invisible to it.
Gen Zs’ parents could expect that a job led to a flat and a flat led eventually to a house, which is not a promise anyone can make to a 23-year-old now. Rent takes a third of what comes in. Potentially buying a house is a joke Gen Z make with their peers. AI is quietly thinning out the junior jobs that were already thin and unlike any generation before them they watch all of it happen on a screen that never stops showing them people their own age doing better. Their parents grew up not knowing what they were missing. This lot know exactly.
So is this a generation that stopped trying? Or a country that stopped making room for them? Britain has spent years asking what is wrong with its young people. It should be asking what happened to the employment ladder and it needs to notice the ones who never got close enough to reach for it.
