A growing number of young Britons are disengaging from the labour market and education system, driven by health issues, economic pressures, and social factors, posing a threat to societal participation and wellbeing.
Britain’s youth unemployment debate has shifted from the old language of “fecklessness” to a far more troubling concern: a growing share of young people are no longer even attached to the labour market or education system. William Davies traces that change back to the Thatcher era, when deindustrialisation and the 1980-81 monetarist shock left many working-class young men without the jobs their fathers had held. In the years that followed, policy moved from moral judgement to classification, first through schemes tied to training and then through the now-familiar Neet label, short for not in employment, education or training.
That category has become a fixture of international comparison, but it now describes a different reality from the one that first prompted its use. According to the article, the UK has more than 1 million people aged 16 to 24 outside work, education or training, with the rate rising to 16% if 16 and 17-year-olds are excluded. That is the highest level since the early 2010s, when post-financial-crisis weakness was still feeding youth unemployment across Europe. Historical data on British youth joblessness shows how often the problem has tracked wider economic shocks, from the early 1990s recession through later downturns and recoveries, but the present crisis looks less like a simple labour-market slump and more like a deeper withdrawal from public life.
The political establishment has responded with a wave of reviews, interim papers and policy think-tank analysis, including work led by former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn. But the article argues that the debate has become more serious than the headlines suggest. Milburn’s review and related testimony from young people point to a generation that feels excluded, isolated and often defeated long before it reaches the jobs market. The key difference from the 1980s is that many of today’s Neets are not unemployed in the conventional sense: they are inactive, often supported by family or disability benefits and sometimes not on the government’s radar at all.
That shift matters because the rise in inactivity is closely linked to health and wellbeing. The article says Britain’s Neet problem since the pandemic is driven largely by a surge in youth disability, including depression, anxiety, ADHD and autism. It notes that young people in Britain now report some of the highest rates of anxiety and depression in the OECD, with the trend worsening steadily since 2010. A review by the clinical psychologist Peter Fonagy is presented as an attempt to think carefully about diagnosis, underdiagnosis and the way schools and welfare systems may now shape demand for assessments as much as respond to them.
The wider causes are not reducible to a single diagnosis or a single policy failure. The article points to poverty, housing insecurity, cuts to youth services, social media, poor sleep and the lingering after-effects of the pandemic as overlapping pressures on adolescent life. It also highlights a finding from OECD data that Britain has made progress on reading scores since 2009 while simultaneously recording a sharp deterioration in pupils’ sense of belonging at school. That matters because school is still the institution that most strongly links children to routine, relationships and aspiration. When that connection breaks down, the result is not just a weaker labour supply but a generation that feels less able to participate at all.
Disclaimer: This content is for informational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical judgment, advice, diagnosis, or treatment.
