Milburn's Review on NEET Young People: Why Welfare Reform Alone Won't Fix It
Alan Milburn's interim review of Young People and Work landed on 28 May 2026. The headline numbers are now everywhere: 1,012,000 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK are not in education, employment or training (NEET) — the highest level in 12 years, costing the economy around £125bn a year. Without action, the review warns, the figure could rise to 1.25 million within five years.
The sector response has been swift and broadly supportive. The Local Government Association, the Learning and Work Institute, Catch22, Mental Health UK, Leonard Cheshire and Mencap have all welcomed the diagnosis and stressed that this is not a story of young people being workshy. Brian Dow of Mental Health UK put it plainly: young jobseekers are not "snowflakes" — they have been failed by older generations, by systems built for a labour market that no longer exists.
We agree.
We also think the framing now hardening around the review — that this is fundamentally a welfare reform problem, to be solved by replacing a "Welfare State" with a "Working State" — risks reducing a structural crisis to a benefits-design exercise. That will not work.
Here is why.
What Milburn gets right
Three findings stand out, and we'd defend them against anyone arguing this is a manufactured panic.
First, the centre of gravity has moved from unemployment to economic inactivity. Around 60% of NEET young people are now economically inactive, up from 55% in 2015. Forty-four percent report a work-limiting health condition — a 70% increase in a decade. The crisis is no longer one of young people looking for jobs that don't exist. It is one of young people unable to engage with the labour market at all.
Second, the entry routes into work have thinned. Vacancies are at a five-year low. Entry-level roles attract hundreds of applicants. In some sectors, young people now compete with automation for the first rung. Better-prepared young people are arriving at a labour market that no longer reliably brings them in.
Third, the school system is failing the children most at risk of becoming NEET — and doing so long before they reach 18. Persistent absence from school in England is up by more than 70% since the pandemic. Persistently absent pupils are 3.9 times more likely to end up NEET. This is the most underappreciated finding in the report. Whatever the autumn recommendations contain, they must reach upstream.
Where the review is going to need help
The diagnosis is good. The framing is where we'd push back.
Milburn's "Welfare State to Working State" formulation will be politically useful — it gives ministers a clean story about activation, conditions and value for money. The £1-on-employment-support against £25-on-benefits ratio is striking and a fair challenge.
But the same data that makes the diagnosis so urgent also undermines a welfare-led response.
Eighty-four percent of NEET young people already say they want to work or train. The barrier is not motivation. Forty-two percent cite mental health as their main barrier; another 12.3% cite a learning difficulty or autism as their primary condition. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has shown that NEET young people are more than three and a half times more likely to be in deep poverty than their employed peers, and that material deprivation triggers and compounds mental ill-health rather than being solved by it.
A welfare reform — even an intelligent one — cannot, on its own, fix any of that.
The deeper fault line: identity and belonging
This is the part the headlines this week are missing.
The research literature on what actually moves young people out of long-term economic inactivity is now reasonably clear. Two findings keep returning.
The first is that mere exposure to STEM, careers content, or work experience does not work. Decades of one-off careers fairs, employer talks and broad-brush "raising aspirations" programmes have produced very little on the metric that matters most: sustained participation by young people from the communities furthest from work. The literature describes what does work as "consequential participation" — sustained, authentic, hands-on engagement in which young people are treated as competent contributors, not as projects.
The second is that domain-specific belonging is a stronger predictor of persistence than general wellbeing or general institutional belonging. When a young person can say "I'm an engineer; I race; I build" — and have peers and adults who agree — they keep going through setbacks that derail their peers who lack that identity. Strayhorn's foundational work on belonging and Hansen et al.'s 2024 study of low-income STEM students both come back to this point: the felt sense of being in the right place, doing the right thing, with people who recognise you, is the load-bearing factor.
Welfare reform cannot manufacture that. Schools, as currently configured, are not delivering it for the young people Milburn is most worried about. The Joseph Rowntree research describes how mainstream schools routinely label neurodivergent and poverty-affected children as "disturbers" — and how those labels drive the alienation that becomes economic inactivity by 18.
This is the gap that informal, hands-on, identity-led programmes are designed to fill. They are not warm-up acts for the "real" intervention. For young people who have already disengaged from school, they are the intervention.
What the autumn recommendations need to do
Milburn's final report is due later this year. Three asks from us.
1. Fund the upstream. Don't pour resource into post-18 activation while 11- to 14-year-olds quietly disappear from school. The persistent-absence figure is a five-year warning. It needs a five-year response, focused on the middle years of secondary school, in the places — and increasingly outside the school gates — where young people are still reachable.
2. Treat informal learning as infrastructure. Community-based, identity-led STEM, arts and skills programmes are where alienated young people rebuild agency. Resource them with the seriousness given to schools, colleges and Jobcentres — not as a bolt-on at the end of the funding cycle. Local authorities, youth hubs and informal providers know how to do this work; what they lack is sustained investment.
3. Change what counts as success. A six-month job placement is the wrong measure for a young person with a work-limiting health condition or a fractured school history. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has spelled out what flexible success measures look like — engagement, progress, sustained participation, mental health gains. Adopt them. Measure what matters.
What we're doing about it
We are a small social venture, and we don't pretend a single workshop changes a life. We don't believe in "leaky pipelines" or one-shot fixes. What we do is build the conditions for the kind of sustained, identity-led participation the research describes.
We use radio control car racing — fast, technical, unmistakably engineering — as the medium. Young people learn to use professional tools, work in teams, diagnose problems, and race in front of peers. They develop what the Royal Academy of Engineering calls "engineering habits of mind" — and what their teachers usually call confidence.
We focus, deliberately, on young people who are underrepresented in STEM and most at risk of becoming the 1.25 million Milburn is warning about. We partner with schools, community organisations, employers and the RC racing community to make it happen.
If you commission services for a borough, council, trust or foundation; if you fund youth or skills work; if you sit in a corporate engineering team that wants to do more than send people to a careers fair — we'd like to talk before the autumn recommendations land. The kinds of interventions Milburn's final report needs to back already exist. They need partners, not pilots.
Get in touch: andy@rcvision.co.uk
