Webinar Debrief: Young People and Work - Learning from Europe on Devolution

Nearly one million 16 to 24-year-olds in the UK are not in education, employment or training - one in eight young people in 2025, projected to rise to one in six by 2030. The Milburn Commission's report, published earlier this spring, confirms that this is not a problem with young people, but is rather a structural failure of the institutions and services meant to support them.

Responsibility for the journey from school to sustained work is dispersed across more than fifty national programmes and multiple public bodies, with no single institution accountable for the whole picture. Countries like the Netherlands and Denmark, where NEET rates are significantly lower, have solved this through genuine devolution - transferring not just responsibility but fiscal accountability and data to the local level.  

The problem isn't young people - it's the system

One of the most important things to understand about the NEET population is that it is not uniform. Some young people are far from the labour market, dealing with significant mental health challenges, housing instability or the long shadow of COVID - for whom a CV workshop will not move the dial. Others are close to employment but stuck behind a single practical barrier: a missing qualification, travel costs, or lack of work experience. Many are ready for work right now, but find employers will not open the door.

The long shadow of COVID came through strongly in the discussion. Many young people had their education interrupted and missed crucial years of socialisation, entering adulthood without the confidence that comes from normal adolescent experience. For some, staying home during lockdown gradually became a way of life - a pattern that has proved difficult to reverse without sustained, personalised support. One striking detail: in a survey of 45 Dutch young people, 43 had held a part-time job before the age of 16. Among UK young people surveyed for the same research, the contrast was stark. Early exposure to work - something that was once unremarkable in Britain - has quietly disappeared, and we should not be surprised that work-readiness has suffered as a result.

The case in the North East

The North East illustrates both what place-based approaches can achieve and what remains out of reach. With around 20% of young people having NEET status, the region faces a striking paradox – where some of the highest economic inactivity in the country is reported, but employers consistently report struggling to fill entry-level vacancies. That points not to a skills deficit but to a system that is not joined up around the individual - and to practical barriers like transport, caring responsibilities and recruitment practices that a fragmented national system is poorly placed to address.

There is also a fundamental misalignment in incentives. Much of the human and fiscal cost of youth economic inactivity is borne locally - by councils, health services and the voluntary sector. But the savings from getting it right flow primarily to national government through reduced benefit spending. Without some form of pain-share/gain-share mechanism in place between regions and central government, the case for local preventative investment is undermined from the start. This is precisely the problem that financial risk-sharing in the Dutch model was designed to solve, and it is a reform that England has not yet grappled with.

The need for change

The discussion kept returning to the three P’s: permanence, personalisation and prevention.  

• The design of a permanent infrastructure rather than time-limited pilots addressing a national unemployment crisis.  
• Personalised support that meets young people at their individual stage of the employment journey, rather than processing them through a one-size-fits-all system.  
• Prevention that starts early - on child poverty, school attendance, mental health and exposure to work - long before a young person reaches NEET age.

The Government’s recent decision to roll-out almost 180 ‘Dutch style’ youth centres at a local level to tackle rising youth unemployment is a welcome step towards adopting a more joined-up approach to public services. Burnham’s commitment to a strengthened vocational education system is also supported by robust international evidence pointing at the importance of technical routes into work and the importance of early intervention, as well as giving regional leaders more power to tailor the future workforce to local labour market dynamics.  

At the Growth and Reform Network, this is an agenda we intend to keep pushing - and will continue the conversation with those working on it at every level of government.