Imagine you’re 20 years old. You left school at 16 with a handful of GCSEs, a mother with a disability, and no money for college. You’ve worked a few zero-hours shifts at a warehouse, but the anxiety that’s been sitting on your chest since you were 14 has made regular employment feel like an impossible ask on most days. You want to do something. You’ve looked at courses. But Universal Credit requires 35 hours a week of job searching, and if you stop, the money stops. So the course stays a thought, and the job search goes nowhere, because there aren’t many jobs and the ones that exist aren’t looking for someone whose CV has a lot of gaps.
You are, in government statistics, “NEET.” Not in employment, education, or training. A data point in a rising trend.
The NEET rate is now 12.7%, up 1.2 percentage points since 2019. Youth unemployment for 16-to-24 year olds sits at 15.3%. These aren’t abstract numbers. They represent a significant share of a generation that the economy has not found a place for, and which the welfare system is actively making it harder to help itself.
Labour’s answer is the Youth Guarantee: £820 million, and a six-month paid work placement for every eligible 18-to-21 year old who has been on Universal Credit and looking for work for 18 months. It’s not nothing. But it rests on a diagnosis that doesn’t survive much scrutiny.
The government’s theory of the problem is wrong
The Youth Guarantee is an activation policy. Its underlying assumption is that NEET young people need a push: a foot in the door, a bit of experience, a coach. Get them job-ready, get them placed, job done.
This is a supply-side answer to what is partly a demand-side problem. There are currently 2.3 unemployed people for every vacancy in the UK. Vacancies have been falling for over three years, down more than half a million from their 2022 peak, and the decline began before recent rises in employer National Insurance contributions, which means it isn’t primarily a story about the cost of hiring. Something structural is happening.
You cannot activate people into jobs that don’t exist. And for young people who are NEET because of mental health difficulties, housing instability, caring responsibilities, or poverty, what they need is not a placement in month 18. It’s support in month one. The 18-month wait is the guarantee’s most revealing design flaw. By the time a young person qualifies, many have already hardened into disengagement.
What could actually change now
The structural answer (a guaranteed income floor, universal services, wealth properly taxed) is a bigger argument for another day. The more urgent question is what could change now, within the constraints of the system we have.
Reform conditionality for under-25s in education or training. The requirement to spend 35 hours a week job-searching makes meaningful learning almost impossible. Exempting under-25s in approved courses from that requirement would remove a real barrier at minimal cost.
Start the Youth Guarantee clock at month three, not month 18, and allow education and training to count from day one as meeting the guarantee: not as an alternative to it, but as part of it.
Introduce a sanctions moratorium for under-25s. The evidence that sanctions deepen poverty, worsen mental health, and make re-engagement less likely is consistent and substantial. Replacing punishment with support would save considerably more in downstream NHS and welfare costs than it spends.
Ring-fence rapid mental health support in colleges and jobcentres. The Liberal Democrats were right in 2024 to make early mental health access a central commitment. Same-week, not same-year, support at the places where young people already are would be transformative for a cohort the current system consistently fails.
Invest in green jobs. Retrofitting homes, expanding renewable energy, improving public transport infrastructure: these are real jobs that public investment can create, addressing the demand gap rather than managing the queue.
It’s also worth noting that a shorter working week, with 32 hours as the full-time standard, would create more part-time entry points for young people stepping into the labour market for the first time, and free up time for training and development. That’s not a marginal consideration.
The longer argument
The young person at the beginning of this piece is not a supply-side problem. She is living with the consequences of a system that makes the right things harder and the wrong things easier, and that reaches for activation as an answer when the question being asked is about structure.
Scrapping the two-child limit will lift 450,000 children out of poverty, and child poverty is the strongest upstream predictor of NEET outcomes. That deserves acknowledgement. But the Youth Guarantee tinkers at the edges of a much deeper problem. We can demand better than that.
* Tanya Park is a Lib Dem County, Borough & Town councillor in Eastleigh, Hampshire and writes at A Just Society, a liberal policy project making the case for radical progressive policies grounded in liberal principles.
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14 Comments
“represent a significant share of a generation that the economy has not found a place for”..
The economy doesn’t exist to find job satisfaction for ultimately anybody. Millions go to work to put a roof over their heads to keep warm clothes their children and pay ther bills.
Life doesn’t owe anybody a living. I know people on here champion those that have arrived in the UK to work in our social care sector and NHS – I spoke to young Nigerian who is working at the local hospital in a domestic cleaning role. She is living in shared accomodation. Travelled thousands of miles after securing a visa from a very poor hometown – she was 21.
The missing information in this piece is that you don’t arrive at the point of being NEET aged 20 without significant input and support over several years. My experience is in Scotland where I know the careers advice service starts working with young people when they are aged 12/13. In the months leading up to young people leaving school, significant work is done by school, careers advisors and others to ensure almost all pupils leave school to a positive destination. Those with caring responsibilities or mental health issues are given particular support throughout secondary school, including advice on accessing social work support and access to benefits where necessary.
Therefore, in the example you suggest, the young person would likely have had access to a whole range of supports for a number of years. If, as a 20 year old, mental health issues are so severe as to make work impossible, they are entitled to disability benefits that are usually far more generous than Universal Credit, without the threat of sanctions. Those with caring responsibilities do not have to search from a job as a condition of receiving Universal Credit.
So, let’s focus on those who do not have mental health problems, or caring responsibilities, and spend much of their days gaming online. If they wish to claim benefits that exist to support those with no job while looking for work, they should be expected to look for a job. That is not unreasonable.
Craig, “Life doesn’t owe anyone a living” misses the point. The way we organise society, work and education should provide an opportunity for all. That includes of course, expecting young people in particular to do what they can to live good productive lives, but where there are problems hindering that, other people and systems need to help.
This government is starting to do something about NEETs but as Tanya says, it is inadequate. I would add the need to change the school curriculum so that youngsters with a more practical bent have greater opportunity to develop. Another factor is the decline in employer participation in the training of young people. Then what about local authorities and colleges being resourced to give long term work experience doing jobs that are needed for our communities.
@Nigel has put his finger on something important – curriculum design and employer participation are real gaps the piece doesn’t address, and they belong in any serious conversation about this. The decline in employer-led training is particularly significant; it’s another place where the market has quietly withdrawn, and nobody has filled the space.
@Craig The piece isn’t arguing that anyone is owed a particular kind of work – it’s arguing that a system requiring 35 hours of job searching a week while making it impossible to study or train is bad design, not tough love. The young Nigerian woman you describe did something remarkable. The question is whether the system here gives our own young people a comparable chance to do the same.
Nigel ; Millions don’t have that luxury to ponder what to do in life. Life’s tough for a lot of people. Some youngsters just need to toughen up. I was 22 when I got married my wife was 20. If someone is spending 35hrs a week job hunting then they are obviously looking in the wrong places.
@ Craig,
“Life doesn’t owe anybody a living.”
Maybe it shouldn’t but we’ll both be able to think of plenty of exceptions who are born into a life of privilege. There’s one famous example in the news right now!
What we should say is that if anyone is able and is prepared to put in the effort they should be able to both earn a decent living and live a fulfilling life.
@Peter I’m sure many do. But let’s be honest it’s a necessity for most people.
Hardly anybody gets remembered for their career. The only time I’ve felt empowered is giving birth to my children. Being a mother for me was the ultimate in fulfillment.
@Peter, you’ve put it well. The system we have doesn’t remotely reflect effort or contribution – it reflects the circumstances you’re born into far more than anything else. That’s what the evidence on child poverty and NEET outcomes consistently shows. If we’re serious about expecting young people to participate, we have to be equally serious about giving them a fair platform to do so from.
@Craig, “looking in the wrong places” might explain one person’s situation. It doesn’t explain why the NEET rate has risen by more than a percentage point since 2019 while vacancies have fallen by over half a million. At some point the scale of a problem stops being a collection of individual attitude failures and starts being a structural question. That’s the point the piece is making.
Thank you Tanya for support on school curriculum and employer participation in more training. In 2022 there were 4 reports on investigations into our schools demonstrating need for change in both curriculum and assessment systems and a few more recently including one from the House of Lords. As a school governor i continue to be involved in youngsters threatened with expulsion and one big factor is their distaste for what they are being taught. On Saturday the ‘i’ reports Alan Milburn on NEETs and he calls for “a system reset” including education. I have called for our party to look at this but apart from our Lords Education spokespeople assisting with the House of Lords report no one seems to agree the need for change; they only talk about more spending on education and SEND.
Not mentioned is that the cost of employing young people has substantially increased due to increases in the min wage and NI. Not surprisingly emplpyers are hirng less of them. The author suggestion of a shorter working week , presumably at the same wages, would of course simply make the problem worse
@Simon McGrath “Not mentioned is that the cost of employing young people has substantially increased due to increases in the min wage and NI”
Mentioned in the paragraph starting “This is a supply-side answer to what is partly…”, Simon.
@ Simon,
“Not mentioned is that the cost of employing young people has substantially increased due to increases in the min wage and NI. Not surprisingly employers are hiring less of them.”
If young workers are being paid more they will very likely spend more and create more jobs.
Those of us who haven’t totally forgotten about Keynesian Economics are aware that close to full employment is always possible if govt adopts the right fiscal policies. The difficulty is to prevent inflation taking hold if fiscal policy is too loose at the same time as being loose enough to create the level of aggregate demand to maintain full employment.
I often find that liberals are far too wedded to the notion that education is best conducted through the formal education system and in the classroom. I’ve got a couple of degrees (Physics and Electronics} and so can claim to have done fairly well in it. I’d have to admit, though, I was very green when I first started work and the learning process continued just as much, if not more, than when I was at university in the years previously.
So it is important for our future prosperity than our young people are paid sufficiently well when they start work and that a substantial degree of training is included. This seems to be taken for granted in countries which do have successful economies- like Germany. It’s not all about their being in the EU!
@ Simon McGrath “Not mentioned is that the cost of employing young people has substantially increased due to increases in the min wage and NI.”
The inflation adjusted changes are negligible. What has changed since the 1980s is well paid business leaders have become more extreme in their determination to not contribute to society, whilst demanding corporate welfare(*) to support their race to the bottom and thus strangle themselves. l worked with one business that complained about the minor NI change. because I had full access to their financials (as acting FinDir I obviously wanted to know what the effects the NI increase would have), I was able to point out that the real cause of their impending financial problem was their failure to adopt some basic margin improvement operational changes, increase prices and wages over the previous 3 years, meaning their workers were earning 20% less in real-terms post April 2025 than they were earning in March 2023 and by the way the statutory minimum pension contribution of 8% (3% employer) was exploitative.
(*) remember the minimum wage was only brought in because business had demonstrated it couldn’t self regulate, resulting in the government paying corporate welfare in the form of employment benefits to workers.
Chloe, “Hardly anybody gets remembered for their career.”
It’s pity, but understandable, you feel that whatever you’ve done hasn’t been regarded as sufficiently worthwhile by society. Firstly we all should be thankful for whatever our parents did. We wouldn’t be here otherwise!
It shouldn’t be about being remembered for what we have done rather than everyone being recognised for doing what they do at the time. We rely on people to drive the trains and buses, or those who run our utilities to supply water and electricity etc. Everyone who works in a shop or a cafe is doing something worthwhile. We don’t usually know their names, and they probably won’t be remembered for their careers afterwards.
Not everyone can be a household name, but the workers of the country keep everything going! Without their efforts everything stops. There should be more recognition.