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Welcome to this week’s The State We’re In. What do Grimsby and Bradford have in common?
Take your pick from historic football teams, a lack of direct trains to and from the south of England or the fact that both were key locations for Britain’s industrialisation: Bradford as a major textiles manufacturing centre – the “Wool Capital” of the UK – and Grimsby as a major maritime location which was once the largest fishing port in the world.
Coming up in this week’s newsletter:
How Bradford and Grimsby helped their young people get jobs. What the headlines get wrong about NEETs. Why the idea that the Chancellor would implement a rent freeze is very interesting.It is the latter commonality that this week’s newsletter will focus on. Bradford and Grimsby have both suffered as a result of Britain’s deindustrialisation. Over the last few years, I’ve visited both places to talk to local people about homelessness and unemployment, and I’ve witnessed first-hand what happens to a town or city when its industry evaporates.
Walk around either place, and you’ll see grand Victorian buildings standing empty in the centre of town, reminders of a prosperous, global past which was full of opportunity. In Bradford, an illuminated neon sign reads “City of Dreams”; it shines above a high street that has also been decimated in recent years.
The unemployment figures for Bradford and Grimsby speak for themselves, particularly when it comes to young people.
In Bradford, the proportion of 18-24 year-olds who were claiming out-of-work benefits at the end of 2025 was more than double the national average of 5.6 per cent at 11.1 per cent.
In Bradford, local schools and colleges have been working alongside employers to help the issue (Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty)Similarly, Grimsby was rather crudely dubbed the “worklessness capital” of Britain by a Channel 4 documentary at the end of 2024 because more than half of the people living in the East Marsh area of town were out of work and relying on state support.
When I visited East Marsh myself for the first time in 2022, I saw up close how community groups were trying to create jobs for young people in the local construction industry. I spoke to a group of young men who were hanging out in the street. “There’s nothing for us here,” they told me.
Each of these headlines misses the point, for reasons I will explain.
But, first, a word on the media and political attention suddenly being showered upon so-called young NEETs – that’s 18-24 year olds who are not in any sort of employment, education or training.
There are currently 900,000 NEETs aged 18-24 in the UK. And, as the independent think-tank, the Resolution Foundation has noted today, the NEET rate for this age group nationally rose from 13 per cent in 2019 to 15 per cent in 2025.
This means that Britain now has the third-highest NEET rate in Europe. By contrast, Germany and Denmark both have a rate of 9 per cent, and the Netherlands has a rate of 5 per cent.
However, while it’s right that political and media attention is given to this issue, not least because evidence shows that being unemployed early on in life is an indicator of being out of work later, youth unemployment was actually higher after the 2008 financial crisis than it is today. So, this isn’t the worst NEET rate we’ve ever seen.
Youth unemployment is always expected to rise during a period of economic downturn so, even though we’re not in a recession like we were in 2010/11, it’s not particularly surprising that these numbers are going in the direction they are given all that our economy has been through since 2019 – lockdowns, inflation, interest rate hikes.
Nonetheless, Britain does have a NEET crisis, and it is particularly obvious in places like Bradford and Grimsby. Not only in the statistics, but also among the young people you meet in these communities.
The real story here isn’t the numbers. It’s the reasons for them.
Britain’s jobs market is weaker than anyone would like it to be, and, as widely reported, there aren’t as many entry-level jobs as there once were. It’s also thought that recent tax changes to the amount of national insurance that employers pay, coupled with minimum wage rises, have made it harder for young people to find employment.
But even these factors don’t give us the full picture. In a report shared exclusively with me for this week’s The State We’re In by the cross-party think-tank Demos, another problem is laid out clearly: weekly pay for 22-29 year-olds has, after adjusting for inflation, not risen at all above its 2008 level. For 18-21-year-olds, it’s down 11 per cent.
This, Dan Goss, lead researcher at Demos, told me in Westminster last week, shows you that young people are being hammered by two things at once: “A stagnant economy and low social opportunity.”
When they do find work, it often doesn’t pay particularly well, even with recent hikes to the minimum wage and forthcoming protections in Angela Rayner’s Employment Rights Act, meaning that it is not secure or stable enough to keep them in their jobs.
However, as Dan and his team’s report makes clear, there is hope, and there is evidence that these problems can be solved. And, not just by forcing young NEETs to “take a job in KFC or lose their benefits” as some headlines have suggested the Government wants to do.
In both Bradford and Grimsby, locally run schemes are supporting young people into the jobs available in their local economy.
Take Catch in Grimsby. It is an independent local apprenticeship training provider located in Grimsby. It uses a membership model, with members including many of the area’s large manufacturers and energy producers, as well as a few smaller companies, educational institutions and local authorities from the Humber region.
In the area surrounding Grimsby, there have been substantial job losses through deindustrialisation, with Brexit compounding harm to export-heavy sectors such as frozen fish. But there are also opportunities in clean energy and agricultural technology.
Catch aims to support local young people to connect with businesses in these areas in order to find them quality work in the form of apprenticeships, which provide a “career ladder”, if such a thing still exists today.
Similarly, in Bradford, SkillsHouse – based within the council’s employment and skills service – works with schools, further education colleges, the University of Bradford and local employers, supporting students from early years through to post-16 employment.
This means connecting young people with local employers in computing, science and environmental technology – all of which are large employers in the area – with potential apprentices as well as their teachers, who can shape their teaching and identify people’s skills accordingly.
“What surprised us is how much good work is happening across the country which isn’t being properly discussed in Westminster,” Dan told me.
“There is not enough awareness in Westminster that this sort of work is going on at a local level. Across Whitehall, you can see Government departments doing good work to try to tackle our NEET problem and talking about reviving left behind towns and neighbourhoods, but these local groups coming up with local solutions, focusing on close human engagement with the problem, just doesn’t seem to cut through at a national level.”
In the end, Dan says the key to solving youth unemployment is “human relationships” between young people, teachers and potential employers.
When you put it like that, it all sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Growth is often talked about in abstract terms, but, as with every aspect of the economy, it is ultimately about people and what they are able to do with their lives. In Manchester, local Mayor Andy Burnham has taken a local approach to youth employment and training. The work in Bradford and Grimsby also shows that more support for local solutions to local problems could yet help Britain dig itself out of a low-growth, high-misery hole.
The independent report into youth worklessness (NEETs) led by the Government’s tsar on the subject, former Labour minister Alan Milburn, is scheduled to be released shortly. It will be interesting to see whether he draws similar conclusions.
Have you had a problem with your local job centre? Are you an employer who has a view on the above? I’d love to talk to you. Please do email me vicky.spratt@theipaper.com
Housing crisis watch
The rumour mill has gone into overdrive following reports that Chancellor Rachel Reeves may consider implementing a national rent freeze in response to the incoming inflation shock caused by Donald Trump and Israel’s war with Iran.
Whether Reeves is actually considering this remains to be seen.
However, there is precedent. Scotland introduced a rent freeze during the pandemic, which continued in response to the inflation crisis that followed. And, earlier this year, Spain implemented a temporary national rent freeze in a bid to tackle housing affordability.
Landlords with mortgages that may go up because of the Iran crisis, however, will be feeling very hard done by while reading the news that their tenants could be on the line for such supportive measures. So far, there is nothing to protect mortgage holders from rate rises.
What I’ve been reading…
For reasons that will become clear very soon, I’ve been reading two books. The first is GIRLS by Gen Z writer Freya India. In it, India explores why young women’s mental health has plummeted and interrogates the role social media has played. The second is Generations by Professor Bobby Duffy of King’s College London. It was published in 2021 and explores how the different generations living together in Britain today may have more in common than you think.Hence then, the article about the towns showing how to get young people off benefits and into work was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
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