Today, the Alan Milburn review into the growing number of young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) has dominated the national headlines.
And rightly so because the findings are truly damning.
More than 1 million young people are now NEET – the highest figure in over 12 years – with the report warning that the number could rise to 1.25 million by 2031 without urgent action.
Shockingly, his research found that the government spends 25x as much on benefits for young people than it does on supporting them into work.
The report says Britain used to be around the EU average for NEET rates. Now only Romania is worse in the whole of Europe.
And yet – 60% of NEET young people are now economically inactive, meaning they are not even looking for work anymore.
Interestingly, in the report – Milburn highlights that loneliness in Britain has quadrupled since 2019 and 70% of young people between 18 and 24 now report experiencing loneliness
This wasn’t news to us – we’ve been long making the case that young adults are now the age group most at risk of loneliness and over 5x more likely to experience persistent loneliness than the over-65s.
But what we think the report fails to properly examine is the deep interconnection between loneliness and unemployment and how that plays out.
The Hidden Social Cost of Unemployment
Research shows us that the cost of unemployment is not just financial. It is social and it’s a deeply lonely experience.
You feel left behind while everyone else appears to move forward. Friends begin building careers, relationships and routines, while your own life can start to feel increasingly stuck in place.
Long stretches of the day are often spent alone at home, with fewer reasons to leave the house and fewer natural opportunities for social interaction that you might have in a workplace. Over time, structure and routine begin to disappear too.
The stigma of unemployment can also be deeply isolating. Conversations that once felt simple suddenly become uncomfortable. Questions like “what do you do?” or “how’s work going?” can begin to trigger embarrassment, shame or anxiety. Eventually, some young people begin withdrawing socially altogether.
And with less money comes fewer opportunities to socialise in the first place. You turn down plans more often. You stop going to events. Small costs that once felt manageable suddenly become stressful. Gradually, social worlds can begin to shrink.
Over time, unemployment stops feeling like a temporary situation and starts affecting confidence, identity and belonging itself.
And eventually it becomes a vicious cycle. Low confidence and low opportunity often leads to a greater chance of rejection. Rejection leads to lower confidence. Lower confidence leads to withdrawal. Withdrawal leads to hopelessness. Then after a while, motivation begins to collapse entirely.
To support this, unemployed adults are 3x more likely to experience persistent loneliness than their employed peers.
In a report by the Co-op Foundation, 61% of young people who experience loneliness say it causes them to lose confidence and 48% say it harms their desire to progress.
Why we need a New Approach
Yet still many interventions and employability initiatives still focus almost entirely on skills.
But the truth is if somebody no longer believes they have a future, no amount of CV writing workshops will solve the problem.
And so earlier this year, we hosted a brand new pilot cohort of LaunchPad Programme – a programme targeted at NEET young adults.
But unlike traditional programmes – rather than focusing purely on employability skills, we focused on the emotional and social barriers that so often prevent people from progressing in the first place.
The young people who enrolled were facing a wide range of challenges – uncertainty around next steps, lack of routine and structure, declining confidence, mental health struggles, social anxiety, challenges linked to neurodivergence, fear of rejection, and growing detachment from society itself.
So alongside mentoring and employability support, we created low-pressure environments where young people could reconnect with others, rebuild confidence and regain momentum at their own pace.
We delivered team challenge days inspired by shows like The Apprentice and Taskmaster, ran dedicated regular co-working and mentoring spaces, and embedded a programme of social connection activities throughout the programme to help foster friendships.
And so participants were not just building skills, but building lasting supportive peer networks with those in the same boat as them to make the experience of being unemployed less lonely.
What we saw was incredible.
Young people who initially struggled socially began staying behind after sessions together. The WhatsApp groups became active and supportive. Participants started eating lunch together unprompted. Confidence visibly grew week by week.
And whilst we are hugely proud of the connections formed and that many have since moved into training, education or employment.
Perhaps the important finding of all was this: the biggest improvement we measured across the programme was hope.
We saw a reported increase of 82% from the start of the programme across the participants in individuals’ outlook towards the future.
And for us – that is such an important outcome as it sits at the centre of motivation, agency and resilience. It shapes whether somebody believes effort is worthwhile. Whether they apply again after rejection.
Because once a young person starts believing there is no place for them in the future of work, detachment can quickly become permanent.
Hope Matters
Milburn in his report lays starkly out the situation facing young people:
“Young people entering adulthood in Britain today face a combination of pressures that no previous generation has experienced simultaneously.
A pandemic that impaired their social development at the most critical window.
A digital environment engineered to capture and monetise their attention.
A housing market out of reach and a labour market that has raised entry thresholds while shrinking entry-level opportunities.
A mental health system that cannot absorb the demand it was never designed to meet.
And an epidemic of loneliness so severe that the World Health Organisation has declared it a global public health concern.”
This aptly tells a story of a generation – not that doesn’t want to work – but that has had the odds stacked against them for so long that they started to lose hope.
And so for many reasons – we believe this report must be a wake-up call. Not just to government, employers, communities but society at large.
We need initiatives and programmes at a scale we have not seen before and re-address the historical underspend of support for NEET young adults.
We need to create opportunities that young people genuine want to engage with, that meet them where they are, help build their confidence (not just their CV).
But more importantly, we need action that will help create action and policy change that will bring hope.
Because if young people no longer believe there is a future worth participating in, then Alan Milburn’s warning may become reality.
Unless action is taken – it really will be a “lost generation” and the consequences will be crippling – not just for our young people, but for the economy and future generations.
