Putting a million neets into work
Britain has a million young people doing nothing. Not studying, not training, not working. The ONS counted 981,000 NEETs in April to June 2026, and 393,000 of them were unemployed and looking for work. The number has been climbing for four years. Only one EU country, Romania, now has a higher NEET rate than ours.
This is not just a statistic. It is a slow waste of talent, energy and ambition. Idleness in youth leaves problems. Those who spend their early years out of work earn less, work less and claim more for decades afterwards.
Every month spent drifting makes the next month more likely, and the present system lets it happen. A young claimant can sit on Universal Credit for a year and a half before anything much is asked of them. By then the habits are formed, the CV is blank, and the confidence has gone.
We might limit job-seeking benefits for under-25s to six months. After that, the benefit stops and a job starts.
Every young claimant still out of work at six months would be offered a fixed-term public service job. Councils, NHS trusts and charities would provide the places. The work would be useful and visible. Parks and public gardens. Libraries and leisure centres. Litter clearance and graffiti removal. Flood defences and footpaths. Support roles in care homes and hospitals.
The job would run for six months at 30 hours a week. Four days would be spent working. The fifth would be kept for job search and training, so that the placement never crowds out the hunt for a real job. Participants would be paid a wage, not a handout. They would turn up, clock in and earn it.
Those who refuse the place would not receive benefit. The deal is simple. Society will not leave you idle, and you will not be paid to stay idle.
The government has already inched towards this idea. Its Jobs Guarantee offers subsidized six-month jobs of 25 hours a week at the minimum wage, and those who decline can lose their benefits. The principle is sound. The timing is wrong. Its guarantee only applies to those who have been on Universal Credit for 18 months.
Eighteen months is far too long. It waits until the damage is done and then offers a cure. Six months catches young people while they are still employable, still hopeful and still in the habit of getting up in the morning.
There is a bonus. Much of the gain arrives before anyone starts. When a compulsory stage looms, many claimants suddenly find work. Some discover they never needed the benefit at all. Evaluations of the New Deal in the late 1990s found job exits rising as the mandatory options drew near. The prospect of a real job concentrates the mind wonderfully.
The sums are modest. Six months at 30 hours on the 18 to 20 minimum wage comes to about £8,500. Deduct the £2,000 or so of Universal Credit that would have been paid anyway. Add perhaps £2,000 for supervision and administration. The net cost is around £8,500 per placement. If 150,000 young people reached the six-month point each year, the bill would be about £1.3 billion. But the deterrent effect would cut that number substantially.
Most of the money is already on the table. The government has committed £820 million to youth employment support, and pays employers a £3,000 grant for each eligible young person they hire. These could be folded into a single budget. Let councils and charities bid for places at a fixed rate per head, and pay on delivery.
The real case is the long-term saving. A young person who drifts into lifelong dependency costs the taxpayer tens of thousands in benefits and lost tax. Rescue even a fraction of them and the scheme pays for itself many times over.
This is not a leap in the dark. Britain has done it before. The Youth Training Scheme, launched in 1983, gave school leavers a year of work-based training with an allowance. In 1988 the government went further. Most 16 and 17-year-olds lost their benefit entitlement in return for a guaranteed training place. That is precisely the bargain proposed here, extended to older claimants.
YTS taught three lessons worth learning. First, places with private employers produced far better results than community workshops. Real firms offered real skills and, often, a real job at the end. The public service jobs should be a backstop. Wherever a private employer will take a young person, that placement should come first.
Second, participants need something to show for it. A recognized qualification or a reference turns a placement into a stepping stone. Without one, the scheme earns the ‘cheap labour’ jibe that dogged YTS.
Third, supervision must be serious. A young person leaning on a broom in an empty park learns nothing but how to lean on a broom.
YTS also points to a cheaper option. Structured as training rather than employment, a placement need not pay the full minimum wage. A trainee allowance set somewhat above benefit levels could halve the cost. The Treasury would welcome it. The young would still be better off working than waiting.
Some will say it is compulsion. It is, but so is turning up for school, and nobody thinks that cruel. Asking something in return for support is not punishment. It is respect.
Some will say it displaces existing workers. A strict rule that every place must be additional, and never a substitute for a paid post, answers that.
Some will say the inactive, the sick and the carers, would slip through. They would, unless the gateway is closed. Health assessments for young claimants should ask what a person can do, not what they cannot. Otherwise the time limit simply shunts people from one queue to another.
A generation is drifting while the system waits. Six months is long enough to look for a job. After that, the state should offer one. Work gives structure, skills and self-respect. Benefits alone give none of these. The young would learn early that there is no such thing as a free lunch, though there might be a subsidized one in the council canteen.
Madsen Pirie