Alan Milburn is right to grasp the nettle. On Tuesday we’ll see his long-awaited report on the million or more people aged 18-24 who are not in education, employment or training – known as Neets. The widespread fear is that hundreds of thousands of this generation have become so accustomed to their inactive world without learning new skills or the discipline of going to work every day that they’ll be permanently blighted: condemned to lives on benefits, doing nothing much, or even lured into crime.
Instead, Milburn wants a radical crusade to get hundreds of thousands of these young adults into learning, apprenticeships and jobs. For people under 24, he also recommends cutting benefits for health problems, especially mental illnesses, to stop them becoming trapped in benefits culture “in perpetuity”. Personal independence payments (PIP) for these young adults and the health element of Universal Credit would be replaced by a more meagre new Youth Allowance.
“The whole system needs to changed,” Milburn told The Times. The current set-up, he rightly said, “is geared to keep young people inactive when, for young people in particular, it’s all about how can you make them active, get them earning, learning, so that they can rely on a wage rather than on a benefit”.
He’s right. And most voters will probably agree. Many think the benefits system makes life too easy for young people. But there are two major obstacles to Milburn’s plans: politics and cost.
Politically, can Milburn – once Tony Blair’s health secretary – really persuade the Labour Party and MPs to accept cuts in benefits for existing claimants? Labour still has a majority of over 160 in the Commons, but last year Keir Starmer was forced by backbench rebels to drop plans to cut PIP for all adults. Won’t backbenchers, with an election even closer now, simply rebel again?
Milburn has also acknowledged his radical programme to get Neets into training, skills and work could cost £6bn a year. In the long term, his hope is that investment will be repaid by young adults getting jobs, moving off benefits, and paying taxes. Maybe. Maybe not. This extra spending demand comes at a time when John Healey can’t yet find the billions needed for defence.
Milburn recommends that billions be invested in employment support, including a vast new team of personal advisers to give Neets one-to-one consultations. “They’ll be coached all the way through,” he says. “The adviser will stick with them until they have found a job or an apprenticeship or college place.” The obvious question is will there ever be enough jobs for these newly trained people?
We’ve already seen how university graduates from the same age group suddenly face a horrific fall in employers wanting people with degrees. This summer, the number of graduate vacancies was almost 50 per cent down on 2025. Graduates from Britain’s top universities are having to take work that doesn’t require a degree. Already it may not be long before thousands of university graduates lower their sights and start competing for work with the Neets Milburn wants to help.
But we can’t do nothing. In the last few weeks, young people have been in dramatic and violent revolt – with riots in France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Belgium, Albania and Serbia. Across Europe, a young generation – some still schoolchildren – have mounted not just traditional peaceful protests, but in many places, violent burning and mass looting – so upset are they with the education they’re getting and bleak prospects of matching the well paid work and good housing their parents often enjoyed.
Worse still, the report by the BBC’s James Waterhouse from Marseille this week shows how in France hundreds of teenagers have taken an alternative to education and employment, and been lured across the country by online ads for jobs in organised crime – including drug-trafficking, kidnaps, intimidation and brutal killings. Waterhouse says Marseille has an astonishing 90 drug-dealing zones – sealed-off housing estates where gangsters mount check-points and the police keep away.
That could be a major British city one day. Organised crime provides an attractive lifestyle for some young people, even at the risk of lengthy jail sentences, gang violence and murder. The rewards are huge tax-free profits; a purpose in life; self-esteem; and kudos among many of their peers. We can’t let Liverpool, Glasgow or parts or London resemble the no-go jungles of Marseilles.
We need the radical thinking that Milburn is putting forward, but we also need our children to be excited for their own futures, to be energised about what they can achieve for themselves. Government intervention is costly and not always guaranteed – it cannot be the only answer to the problem.
I want to see our schools encourage self motivation and an understanding that not everything can be provided for them. A spirit of entrepreneurism in the classroom perhaps. We need entrepreneurs’ clubs in every school and university in the kingdom, where students can be taught how to spot gaps in markets, or new human needs, to create new inventions, or work out how to improve existing products and services.
Just imagine if Burnham and Milburn could install a new entrepreneurial spirit across Britain. Now that would be neat.
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