Today the government-commissioned Milburn Review published its interim findings on youth unemployment in the United Kingdom. The headline figure, 957,000 young people aged 16 to 24 not in education, employment or training, is not new. What is new is the trajectory. Without urgent intervention, the review warns that figure could rise to 1.25 million within five years. One in six young people. A lost generation.
The crisis in numbers
This is not a problem that arrived with the current government. It is a problem that has been building for thirty years, accelerated by a pandemic, worsened by a National Insurance increase that suppressed entry-level hiring at precisely the wrong moment, and now documented in forensic detail by a review commissioned by a government that is simultaneously responsible for some of the policies making it worse.
The politics of that position are uncomfortable. The substance of the crisis is worse.
In January to March 2026, there were 729,000 young people aged 16 to 24 who were unemployed — 110,000 more than the previous year, according to the House of Commons Library research briefing published on 19 May. The youth unemployment rate stood at 16.2 per cent, up from 14.2 per cent a year earlier. That is the highest rate since 2015 and it exceeds the peak pandemic rate of 15.2 per cent recorded in September 2020.
The figure for young people not in full-time education tells a similar story. The unemployment rate for this group reached 14.6 per cent, the highest since 2014, and higher than the peak of the pandemic economic slump when it stood at 13.5 per cent.
But the most alarming figure is not the unemployment rate. It is the economic inactivity figure. There are currently 882,000 young people not in full-time education who are economically inactive, meaning they are neither employed nor looking for work. That figure is the highest since the ONS began collecting comparable data in 1992. These are not people who are between jobs. They are people who have, for a range of reasons, disconnected from the labour market entirely.
The Work Foundation at Lancaster University, responding to the May 2026 labour market statistics, described the situation starkly: youth unemployment had reached levels not seen since September-November 2014. “Today’s labour market figures underline the importance of government remaining focused on the challenges facing young people in accessing sustainable and well-paid work,” said Ben Harrison, the Foundation’s director.
The regional divide
The regional picture adds a further dimension. London, far from being insulated by its economic weight, has the worst youth unemployment rate of any UK region at 24.9 per cent — more than eight percentage points above the national average. Northern Ireland has the lowest rate at 6.5 per cent. That 18-point gap between the best and worst performing regions is itself a significant policy failure, it suggests a structural divergence in the labour market that aggregate national targets cannot adequately address.
THE MILBURN REVIEW: WHAT IT FOUND
The interim findings of the government-commissioned review, led by former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn, were published today. They are bleak.
Milburn was commissioned by the Department for Work and Pensions in November 2025 to examine the root causes of the NEET crisis, with a particular focus on the role of mental health conditions, disability, and childhood experience. His call for evidence closed in February 2026. His interim report, published today, describes findings “much worse than initially anticipated.”
The review identifies four structural causes of the crisis.
1.6 Million Jobs Have Vanished: The Disappearance of Entry-Level Work
The first is the disappearance of entry-level work. There are 1.6 million fewer low and medium-skilled jobs in the economy than a decade ago. Vacancies in hospitality have halved in the last four years alone. The Saturday jobs and first employment opportunities that generations of young people used as their first rung on the career ladder have largely gone, replaced in some sectors by automation and self-service technology, and in others by a contraction in consumer-facing businesses under cost pressure.
Apprenticeship Collapse: A 35% Decline in a Decade
The second is the collapse of apprenticeships. Apprenticeship starts have fallen 35 per cent in the past decade. The reforms to apprenticeship funding introduced in 2017, well-intentioned in their aim of improving quality, created a levy system that large employers used primarily for management and professional training rather than entry-level provision. The number of apprenticeships for young people aged 16 to 18 has fallen sharply as a result.
The Catch-22: How Young People Can’t Get Experience Without a Job
The third is the Catch-22 Milburn describes in precise terms. Employers demand work experience. Young people cannot get work experience without being hired. The first job is now the hardest job to get, and the system has not adapted to that reality. “The first rung of the career ladder has thinned,” Milburn said ahead of today’s publication. “For too many young people it is now simply out of reach.”
Mental Health and Social Media: The Hidden Driver of Youth Inactivity
The fourth is the mental health dimension. The review found that anxiety linked to social media is a significant driver of economic inactivity among young people, a factor that is both quantitatively significant and notoriously difficult for employment policy to address. Six in ten of the young people in the NEET cohort have never had a job. That figure, cited in the review and in the Hansard record of the DWP Secretary of State’s Commons statement in March, is the one that most clearly illustrates the depth of the structural disconnection.
Milburn’s central argument is that the current approach is not a failure of young people. It is a failure of a system that places young people in an impossible position and then provides inadequate support. “This is not a failure of young people,” the review states. “It is a failure of a system stuck in the past.”
Lastly, the most financially striking finding is the imbalance in public spending. For every £1 spent on employment support for young people, approximately £25 is spent on benefits. Milburn’s review describes this as “a fundamental imbalance in how public money is spent”, and it is difficult to argue with that framing. The current system is optimised for managing the consequences of youth unemployment, not preventing it.
THE PARLIAMENTARY DIMENSION
The Milburn Review does not operate in isolation. It was commissioned by the government to run alongside a parallel parliamentary inquiry, the Work and Pensions Committee’s investigation into youth employment, education and training, which launched in January 2026.
The Committee’s inquiry has taken oral evidence from a range of witnesses including the British Chambers of Commerce, the West Midlands Combined Authority, Skills Development Scotland, and experts from the OECD and the Institute of Employment Research at Warwick University. Oral evidence published on 11 March 2026 shows the Committee examining the structural changes in the labour market, the regional disparities, and the question of what government intervention at scale would actually require.
The West Midlands evidence is particularly instructive. The region has 29,900 young people in the youth unemployment cohort, a figure that has risen 53 per cent since March 2020. The WMCA’s evidence to the Committee framed this as “a stubborn and persistent challenge, which is growing.”
The Committee’s inquiry is explicitly designed to complement rather than duplicate the Milburn Review. Where Milburn identifies causes and makes recommendations, the Committee scrutinises what the government is actually doing about it, and whether the response is adequate.
The Hansard record from 17 March 2026 shows the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions making a telling admission in response to a parliamentary question. Challenging the Conservative claim that the NEET figures are a consequence of decisions taken in the last two years, the Secretary of State confirmed that the number of young people not in education, employment or training rose by 250,000 in the three years running up to the last election. Youth unemployment is a structural inheritance, not a two-year phenomenon. Neither side of the House can claim clean hands.
It gets worse
There is a specific and politically uncomfortable dimension to the current crisis that the Milburn Review acknowledges obliquely and that others have stated directly.
The April 2025 increase in employer National Insurance contributions, from 13.8 per cent to 15 per cent, combined with a reduction in the secondary threshold, increased the cost of employment at precisely the moment the youth labour market was most vulnerable.
Flint Global’s analysis, published in February 2026, found that the impact on entry-level employment was greater than expected and “highly concentrated” in the sectors most likely to employ young workers, specifically hotels, pubs and restaurants, where the employment impact was the most severe in every region of the UK.
Efforts to rectify NI hikes
The London Assembly passed a motion in March 2026 specifically calling on the government to reverse the National Insurance increase and produce an urgent plan for youth unemployment. Neil Garratt AM, who proposed the motion, linked the NI increase directly to the contraction in part-time and entry-level roles disproportionately held by young people.
The Next chief executive Simon Wolfson, Conservative peer Lord Wolfson, gave evidence describing a “dramatic” fall in entry-level jobs, directly attributing part of this to the NI increase. The government’s response that employer NI contributions are lower when hiring under-21s, and that the minimum wage increase boosted pay for over 200,000 young workers, is technically accurate. It does not address the evidence that the overall employment cost increase suppressed hiring at the entry level precisely where young people compete for their first jobs.
The government finds itself in the position of having commissioned a review that identifies the decline of entry-level work as a primary cause of the NEET crisis, while having implemented a policy that the business community consistently identifies as a contributor to that same decline. That tension will not be resolved by the interim review. It will need to be addressed in the government’s response to Milburn’s final report, due this summer.
WHAT THE GOVERNMENT IS DOING
In fairness to the government, it has not been passive. The response to Alan Milburn’s interim findings, published today alongside the review, sets out a package of measures that ministers describe as “the biggest youth employment reforms in a generation.”
These include a Youth Jobs Grant for businesses which is launching next month and provides a financial incentive to hire and retain young people who have been out of work for an extended period. The government has committed to creating 500,000 opportunities for young people, including more apprenticeships and subsidised employment placements. The Youth Guarantee aims to ensure that young people out of work for 18 months are offered a six-month placement in construction, care or hospitality. The government has also committed to doubling the number of Youth Hubs.
The Education Secretary’s response to Milburn’s interim findings described the review as laying bare “the scale of the challenge and the root causes of youth unemployment we now need to confront”, an acknowledgement that the scale of the problem exceeds what existing programmes can address.
Are these measures enough?
Are these measures commensurate with the scale of the challenge? Milburn describes. The review calls for a “system reset”, a transition from what it describes as a Welfare State that “exacerbates inactivity” to a Working State that “builds capability.” That is a structural argument about the design of the entire support system, not a case for adding new programmes on top of what already exists. Milburn is explicit: “new programmes layered on top of a broken system cannot work.”
A Youth Jobs Grant and 500,000 new placements are significant. They are not a system reset.
The Catch-22 that no programme solves
The deepest structural problem in the youth unemployment crisis is one that the Milburn Review identifies clearly and that no government programme has yet adequately addressed. Young people are told they need work experience to get a job. Consequently, they cannot get work experience without getting a job. The entry-level positions that used to provide that first foothold, the Saturday job at a supermarket, the seasonal work at a restaurant, or the retail assistant position, have declined sharply. The hospitality sector, once one of the largest employers of young people in their first jobs, has contracted significantly. The automation of retail checkout and the decline of traditional high street retail have removed significant volumes of first-employer positions.
What remains at the bottom of the labour market is more competitive, not less, because there are fewer positions and more people competing for them, including older workers pushed out of other roles. The 84 per cent figure from the NEET survey is perhaps the most important number in Milburn’s interim report. Eighty-four per cent of NEETs said they wanted a job or training. The narrative that young people do not want to work is not supported by the evidence. The narrative that the system has failed to provide accessible routes into work is.
WHAT THIS MEANS POLITICALLY
The political reckoning
The youth unemployment crisis arrives at a difficult moment for a government already weakened by the 7 May election results. Labour lost 1,496 council seats three weeks ago. Its support among younger voters, who might have been expected to be its most natural constituency, has fragmented towards the Greens and, in some demographics, towards parties that frame the system’s failures in terms of generational betrayal.
Reform UK has begun framing youth unemployment in its own language, less about investment and support, more about immigration and job competition. That framing is not well-supported by the labour market data, which shows the crisis concentrated in entry-level domestic service sector employment rather than sectors characterised by high migration. But political narratives do not always follow the evidence.
The Green Party, which made historic gains on 7 May, has consistently argued for a Green Jobs Guarantee specifically targeted at young people, a job guarantee rather than a placement scheme, backed by public investment in the clean energy transition. That offer speaks directly to the structural argument Milburn makes: that you cannot solve a problem caused by the disappearance of entry-level work without creating new entry-level work at scale.
The government’s response to the final Milburn report, due this summer, will be the moment of political reckoning. The interim findings have established the scale of the problem. The final report will make specific recommendations. The government will then have to decide whether it is prepared to make the systemic changes Milburn is pointing toward — or whether it will respond with a package of programmes that, as the review itself warns, cannot work layered on top of a broken system.
THE BOTTOM LINE
The numbers in today’s Milburn interim report are not projections or estimates. They are a description of the present.
957,000 young people not in education, employment or training. 729,000 unemployed. 882,000 economically inactive and not in full-time education, the highest figure since 1992. A youth unemployment rate of 16.2 per cent, higher than at the peak of the pandemic.
Six in ten young people in the NEET cohort have never had a job.
For every £1 spent on helping them, £25 is spent managing the consequences of not helping them.
Alan Milburn’s phrase “detachment is no longer temporary, for too many young people it is becoming permanent”, is the most important sentence in today’s report. The final report this summer will test whether the government has understood what that sentence means in policy terms.
The evidence suggests it has not yet understood it fully. It has a few months to catch up.
FURTHER READING AND SOURCES
ONS Labour Market Statistics, May 2026
House of Commons Library Research Briefing: Youth Unemployment Statistics, 19 May 2026
Work and Pensions Committee: Youth Employment, Education and Training inquiry, launched January 2026
Work and Pensions Committee oral evidence, published 11 March 2026
Hansard: Youth Unemployment debate, 17 March 2026
Work Foundation (Lancaster University): Labour Market Statistics response, May 2026
Flint Global: Has the employer National Insurance rise proved to be a tax on jobs?, February 2026
London Assembly motion on National Insurance and youth unemployment, March 2026
Alan Milburn Interim Review: Young People and Work, 28 May 2026
Government response to Milburn Interim Review, 28 May 2026
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