The Neet crisis has been widely discussed, and with good reason. More than one million young people in Britain, aged 16 to 24, are not in employment, education or training. These years are crucial: missing this window can have long-lasting effects on earnings and employment prospects.
Worse still, the proportion of kids in this desperate condition has been rising fast: from 12 per cent at the end of 2023, to a new high of 13.5 per cent in Q1 2026. The UK’s Neet rate has risen while many European countries have reduced theirs, leaving the UK among the worst performers in Europe, with only Romania recording a higher rate in recent comparisons.
The crisis
Andy Burnham knows we’ve got a problem. But to fix it, he’ll need to know why so many young people seem to be frittering away their futures. A shortage of jobs would require different remedies from unfitness for work. I’ll pull together the siloed research on three quite different potential remedies. The Neet crisis turns out to need all three of them.
A growing proportion of economically inactive Neets report health problems, including mental ill health, as a reason they are unable to work. An overlapping bunch have been fostered, or are in Special Needs schools, or have been raised by inexperienced, young parents. As someone who had to salvage such traumatised little kids, I learnt how money spent avoiding what our kids suffered would have been both kinder and cheaper than remedial efforts, even when successful. Another tragic pack, overlapping with those suffering anxiety, messed up their GCSEs. Nationally, a third of kids leave school without level 4 or above in Maths and English. Poor performance is class-biased: the lower the status, the worse the performance. I know one brilliant kid with zero GCSEs, desperate to work. But due to Whitehall’s credentialism, he’s stuffed before he starts: many vocational routes require them. Part of the work-class problem is low income, but it’s also cultural. Middle-class families are more familiar with the phrases, habits, and expectations aligned with exam success.
The Neet rate is generally higher across much of northern England and the Midlands than in London. In the capital, only 12 per cent of kids are Neets, while the North-East has the highest rate (15-21 per cent), followed by Yorkshire and Humberside, the East Midlands, the North-West and the West Midlands. Young people growing up in London have cultural advantages: abundant role models of success; and often raised by aspirational parents – either well-educated and working in high-skilled Finance jobs, or immigrants keen for their children’s success. London’s GCSEs reflect it: it’s the top-performing region. The antithesis of these cultural advantages is the bleakness facing kids growing up in our broken, demoralised and deprived coastal and former industrial towns. Take Blackpool: despite five years of renewal driven by an excellent mayor, it still has one of the highest rates of male suicides in the country. This wide divide between London and provincial towns and cities isn’t age-old: it reflects accelerating policy centralisation in London. Until 1976, the crowded South-East was losing people to the space-rich North.
To sum up, the epicentre of the Neets tragedy is identifiable as working-class kids in provincial England. These are the young lives permanently scarred. These are the costly tragedies.
Andy Burnham has stressed the importance of renewing working-class culture from within. This is where I start: how agency and self-belief can be restored to demoralised and despairing working-class communities. It can ignite a bottom-up process driven by the passionate and energetic people in which England has always excelled. Next come policies undertaken by local authorities that actively support this renewal, aimed especially at fragile families trying to rear kids. Beyond that, policies can ease pathways into work for working-class youth.
So, here are my three policies:
1. Renewal from within
Who were the Rochdale Pioneers celebrated in Burnham’s Manchester speech? Courageous working-class people, they created the Co-operative Movement to cut food prices and then proselytised it around Europe. In my hometown of Sheffield there was a strong tradition of choirs: the type of ‘social capital’ that Harvard’s Robert Putnam made emblematic. My Aunt Ivy formed one: she swelled with pride showing me a letter from her vicar thanking her for salvaging lives from loneliness. She was still fighting in her 90s to protect frantic old people: successfully blocking their home from being closed. Such stuff can work for Neets just as well.
We used to be good at it, but to unleash it we need to ease the plethora of stifling impediments to non-state initiative beloved of Whitehall. Take the accumulating curbs like DBS checks – now needed even for a firm to take on young apprentices. (I know one that withdrew a scheme rather than burden its workers with these insulting checks.) We cannot eliminate risks like paedophilia, and attempts to do so increase unanticipated costs like fewer apprenticeships.
Some still manage to make a difference. Take Jason Stockwood’s efforts to renew his impoverished hometown of Grimsby, and Jonathan Ruffer’s to renew Bishop Auckland. Jason grew up as a clever working-class lad who stumbled into venture capital and put his wealth to the purpose of helping others in his community. He has catalysed a hundred local people to form a not-for-profit enterprise with agreed purposes aligned with Burnham. One is social housing: by renovating derelict terraced housing, the group is accumulating a stock. Another renovates Grimsby’s dockland, making it an attractive waterfront suitable for new local businesses. Recently ennobled, Jason is the latest Minister-of-State for Investment, meeting a third Burnham priority: attracting FDI.
Jonathan Ruffer grew up on Teesside, founded an investment firm and made a fortune. His purpose was to renew Bishop Auckland, an impoverished and demoralised town, sarcastically renamed by local kids Bish Vegas, the glitzy promise being the antithesis of their hometown. Jonathan has poured his fortune into making it an exciting place to visit, with an active theatre, a spectacular art gallery, and wonderful amenities, in the process renovating its appearance. Jonathan has set up a foundation run by local people, drawn in by his infectious sense of enthusiasm and optimism. On the back of the inflow of visitors, other businesses have been stimulated. Bish now offers hope.
Although England has an exceptionally strong tradition, inspiring people are found everywhere. My favourite is a young communitarian priest, Father José, sent to a small town in the Basque country. Patient but persistent, he spent a decade training five other people. Their task: start a business and use its profits for jobs-of-the-future for local kids, then spin-off new firms doing the same. Decades later, rebranded Mondragon, it employs 90,000, plus 18 training colleges, all run by people inspired by that purpose. Mondragon has transformed its region: once violent, poor and hopeless, now among Spain’s most prosperous communities.
People like Jason, Jonathan and Father José, who combine care, gumption and infectious enthusiasm, have long catalysed the process of cultural change in left-behind communities. Such skills can now be unleashed to get Neets into jobs.
2. Supporting public policies for cultural renewal
The culture of Whitehall is utterly remote from working-class communities in distressed places struggling to get their kids into work. This has been compounded by the historic aversion of the Treasury to any place-based interventions. Whitehall is ill-suited to direct renewal policies, so Burnham’s core mission is vital: the transfer of agency and resources to the local authorities facing the Neet crisis. It encapsulates the principle of Subsidiarity: devolve agency to the lowest level of authority suited to the objective.
Putnam shows that local cultures periodically change; in America swinging from being highly individualistic in 1900 to community-minded, until peaking in the 1960s. Thereafter, cultures reverted, by 2000 they were back to where they had been in 1900. Since then, a sense of community has disintegrated. So, cultures can change, for the better as well as for worse.
We can learn from societies like Germany that rebuilt social capital. When the Nazis surrendered, the Allies seized their opportunity to change Germany’s toxic culture of obedience to Hitler. Communities needed to reimagine themselves as having agency over their lives, so the Allies devolved government from Berlin to the regions. Germany gives substantially greater fiscal and administrative powers to its Länder than England gives its local authorities. Regional equity is built into the constitution, the “Basic Law” that Andy Burnham praised in his Manchester speech.
Regional governments subsidised citizens to form civic associations for non-political purposes. By mixing with those from different parties and classes, people met and made friends, softening divides. Putnam extols this as bridging social capital. Whereas in England there has been a measurable decrease in associational life and a corresponding increase in loneliness and social isolation, in Germany participation in associations has massively increased: currently, half of adults belong to one or more. Despite the task of strengthening England’s post-war social capital initially being less daunting than in Germany, Whitehall and political leaders have fluffed it, their failure to support the renewal of social capital in the communities where Neets predominate being an instance.
3. Public policies to ease Neet pathways into work
Many public policies impinge on whether Neets find pathways into worthwhile work. Burnham lambasted our education policies: why is he right?
Neets are being failed by our schools and the educational practices set for them by the Ministry of Education: most have failed to pass GCSE in Maths and English. Yet other Whitehall Departments – notably Employment – have systematically made them necessary for much vocational employment. It wasn’t deemed necessary for Lord Jason Stockwood to be appointed Secretary of State. Nor for Sir Nigel Wilson to become a hugely distinguished CEO of Legal and General Insurance Company – he left school at 14. So, is GCSE Maths really necessary for all nurses? It never used to be. In an article for the Financial Times, Alison Wolf, the expert on apprenticeships, notes: “It’s almost impossible to progress in the NHS without formal qualifications”. Is GCSE English necessary for a 50-year-old Syrian immigrant who previously worked for 20 years as a plumber? Although he can now speak English, he is illiterate even in Arabic? Instead, this man is living on benefits.
Such credentialism is a hiring barrier. There are tasks in which English and Maths GCSEs matter, so why are most provincial working-class kids not getting them? It reflects either a failing in schools as to how they are being taught or in the content expected for passing the exams – and above them, the dreaded Inspectorate.
Burnham’s insistence on parity of esteem for vocational and cognitive skills and jobs starts with apprenticeships. Here, Wolf’s analysis is devastating. Kids want apprenticeships more than university, but few get them. She too blames public policy: over-regulation, and Treasury penny-pinching: funding for training has been savagely cut. She cites a new study comparing the apprenticeship costs facing our employers compared with Germany and Austria. It finds that in matched trades, ours are by far the highest and hugely bureaucratic. Whitehall levies and spends an “Apprenticeship Tax” of £3.1bn, but as usual its design is idiotic: the outcomes “unintended and unforeseen”, in Wolf’s words.
In Manchester, Burnham’s partnerships with local firms created a thousand apprenticeships – remarkable given the obstacles. Once the city-regional Authorities have the money currently misspent by Whitehall, they can rebuild the ecosystems linking local firms, training colleges and schools. This cannot be run from Whitehall, but it can be a core purpose of local government – close to all of them, and accountable to local people. Instead, Whitehall’s Ministry of Education has privileged its own city. Despite London’s GCSE performance being better than all other regions, it has awarded its schools higher funding per pupil than anywhere else: far more than the North-East and Yorkshire and Humberside. It cannot be trusted as the steward equalising life chances between regions.
We could also learn from other countries. Part of the reason why the Netherlands has far fewer Neets is because it combines regional flexibility in education, rather than imposing a blanket national policy. Being closer to the problem, the regional governments often provide intensive catch-up over the summer for school pupils who have fallen behind at the end of a school year. For those needing something more, the power of decision is devolved to schools, which can use their judgement. They can encourage grade repetition, usually with tailored study plans supported by mentoring and tuition. Those who keep failing exams – often a symptom of boredom rather than stupidity – are guided to a vocational programme.
In England, children are rarely required to repeat a school year, although schools provide varying forms of catch-up support. As many fall further behind, those that become unmanageable are sent to unregulated private schools charging high fees, incentivising them to keep kids there. The differences with the Netherlands in policies are as stark as those in outcomes.
To sum up
We have a Neet crisis triggered by an avoidable tragedy of wasted young lives. Yet it’s not surprising given the predilections of Whitehall. This is one of the easier of Andy Burnham’s inherited tragedies: in a decade, it can be fixed. We will need the three types of policy set out above; all are valuable and aligned with his programme. With much to be angry about, he has plenty to get his teeth into.
[Further reading: Real devolution is a vision worth fighting for]
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