A million young people written off, and the government calls it a review

More than a million young people in Britain are not in work, education or training. If nothing structurally changes, that number will reach 1.25 million by the early 2030s.

A £125bn problem, named at last

That is the central finding of Part One of the government-commissioned review published today by Alan Milburn, the Blair-era Health Secretary appointed by the Starmer government to examine the scale of youth economic inactivity. The annual cost of this, the report states, is £125 billion. Lost productivity, benefit expenditure, reduced tax receipts, health costs: a number that size represents what Britain pays every year to maintain a labour market that has no place for one in eight young people.

Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden stood at the launch and called the report “really important and powerful.” He announced nothing.

This is, as Milburn’s own framing has it, a record of failure. The report does not dress that up. It describes structural causes, a damning pattern across multiple governments, and a generation at risk of being written off before it has started.

Who built this and who is being asked to fix it

Before the report’s conclusions are absorbed, the politics of who wrote it deserve a moment.

Alan Milburn spent four years as Health Secretary under Tony Blair driving NHS privatisation: foundation hospitals, private finance initiative contracts, the opening of NHS commissioning to private providers. The health consequences of those choices, hollowed-out mental health services, CAMHS waiting lists that now run to years, a primary care system under structural strain, are among the causes the NEET problem sits on top of. A young person waiting 18 months for a mental health referral does not make it into work or training. That is not an abstract connection; it is the lived arithmetic of the crisis Milburn has been asked to diagnose.

The Starmer government chose him. That choice tells you something about the government’s ideological comfort zone.

The Social Mobility Commission that Milburn chaired from 2012 published repeated warnings about structural inequality and was repeatedly ignored. In December 2017, Milburn and three colleagues resigned from it, citing the government’s failure to act on its own commissioned recommendations. He knows exactly what commissioned reviews can produce and what governments do with them.

The Grimsby arithmetic

There is a 19-year-old in Grimsby named Cohen who has been searching for work in a town where, as the ground-level reporting describes it, the vape shops are open and the jobs are not. He is one in a million. Not metaphorically: he is one of the more than one million young people this report counts, in towns and cities across Britain where the labour market has contracted, the public sector has been cut, and the remaining work is insecure, low-paid, or inaccessible to people without the health, qualifications, or transport to reach it.

The £125bn figure is a national total. Cohen’s version of it is simpler: he cannot find work, and the state has commissioned a review.

What the government is doing while it waits for Part Two

This is Part One of the review. It is explicitly diagnostic. Part Two, which will carry recommendations, has not been published. The government may be holding its response until it arrives. That is the most charitable reading of today’s silence.

It is not, however, the only reading available.

At the same time as this report was launched, the Starmer government’s welfare reform bill is proceeding through parliament, cutting disability benefits and tightening work-conditionality requirements across the same 16 to 24 age group that Milburn’s review is trying to bring back into economic life. A government that commissions a report saying young people are structurally locked out of the labour market, and simultaneously cuts the income floor for those same young people, is not pursuing a coherent strategy. It is pursuing two strategies that contradict each other, and calling both of them reform.

The structural causes Milburn identifies, mental health, housing, regional labour markets, inadequate skills provision, the collapse of entry-level employment in post-industrial towns, require spending. They require the reversal of two decades of cuts to the services that would address them. None of that is in the Spending Review. Skills England is being stood up; the apprenticeship levy has been adjusted. These are not nothing. They are also not commensurate with a £125bn annual cost and a projected rise to 1.25 million young people outside the economy by the early 2030s.

The review economy

Britain has a particular way of managing problems it does not intend to solve. It commissions a review. The review takes evidence, produces findings, generates a launch event, earns a minister’s praise, and sits in a queue behind fiscal rules and party management calculations. Milburn himself has been through this cycle before, on a different brief, for a different government. He resigned from the last one.

The diagnosis in this report is correct, and it matches what ONS data and any journey through post-industrial Britain will confirm. Whether the government that received it today has any intention of doing what the diagnosis requires is the only question that matters now. One million young people are waiting for a Part Two. On current form, it will be received with equal warmth and equal inaction.

Pat McFadden called it powerful. The minister’s department would.