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The ideas that Neets (young people not in education, employment or training) simply aren’t trying hard enough to find a job, or don’t want one, are “myths,” Alan Milburn wrote in his interim report on the subject earlier this year – “sometimes cruel ones”. Although 84% of Neets say they want to work, their prospects are unfairly limited by where they live. Rotherham has one suitable vacancy for every 22 young adults. The Cotswolds has one for every four. For too many young people, particularly those in deprived parts of Britain, there simply aren’t enough jobs.
This is the finding from an index published last week by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), which ranked British towns according to the availability of jobs for young people. Like so many features of Britain’s Neet crisis, from poor mental health to school drop-out rates, the index is a map of disadvantage. At the top are affluent towns in southern England that account for nine in 10 of the areas with the highest numbers of vacancies. At the bottom are places such as Inverclyde and East Renfrewshire, where young people might once have followed their parents into manufacturing and industry. Deindustrialisation destroyed those jobs, and such places never recovered.
Given that half of the rise in Neets aged 18 to 24 since 2019 is due to changes in the labour market, jobs are a good place for the government to focus. In 2024, the Starmer government launched a “youth guarantee,” including a pilot jobs programme that provides six months’ paid work to 18 to 24-year-olds who have been receiving universal credit for 18 months. This was a positive step, but 18 months is far too long for young people to wait for support, and almost half of Neets don’t claim benefits, so aren’t eligible for this scheme.
The IPPR has called for the creation of a new “youth contract”, comprising short-term placements for all people at risk of becoming Neet in areas where jobs are scarce, more apprenticeships at the smaller firms that dominate Britain’s labour market, and more dedicated work coaches. These would all be improvements to the status quo. But if today’s young people are to find employment that will sustain them into adulthood, the government will need an industrial strategy capable of creating long-term opportunities in places where few exist.
The devolution of vocational training to local authorities, which are better placed to understand the demands of regional labour markets than Whitehall civil servants, is welcome. But ministers will need a dose of realism about where “good” jobs will come from. Andy Burnham’s talk of “reindustrialising” regions resembles a Westminster pipe dream. As manufacturing has developed, it has lost the ability to reliably create widespread employment. Even in the US and China, where governments have generously subsidised industry, manufacturing jobs continue to fall as a share of total employment.
As the economist Dani Rodrik recently observed in an essay collection about reindustrialisation, much of Britain’s future employment won’t be in manufacturing or high-productivity service sectors, but in industries such as retail, hospitality and care. If Mr Burnham wants to create “good growth in every postcode”, his government must transform the conditions of work in these industries so they provide gainful employment – and opportunities for today’s young people to build future careers.
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