Alan Milburn’s interim report on young people not in education, employment or training is a serious and sobering piece of work. Across its 217 pages, the report sets out what it calls the record of failure: around a million 16 to 24 year-olds now categorised as ‘NEET’, roughly one in eight, with the UK’s rate having fallen from near the European average a decade ago to the second worst in Europe, behind only Romania.
Six in ten of those young people have never had a single job, against four in ten in 2005; the cumulative cost is estimated to be £125bn. The report is right to reject the lazy myth that this is a generation unwilling to work. The overwhelming majority of young people desperately want to be in work, education or training. The current system is failing them.
Milburn’s report identifies fragmentation as the central structural problem in the organisation of services intended to support young people: silos persist between schools, further education colleges, local government, employment support and the NHS, with minimal monitoring and almost no accountability for outcomes.
He uncovers a welfare system that spends roughly £25 on benefits for this group for every £1 on helping them back into work. He places health, and mental health in particular, at the centre of the story, noting that young people classified as NEET are now more likely to be economically inactive than unemployed. The mental health dimension of inactivity not only costs the Exchequer but exposes the risk of creating a ‘lost generation’.
Our concern is with what happens next; Milburn’s interim report is diagnostic and the recommendations come in the autumn. The next steps on policy for NEETS relate to the strategic state question we have posed throughout this series. Milburn’s diagnosis points, rightly, to the need for structural reform rather than another government programme or scheme layered on top of existing fragmentation. But the structural diagnosis raises a structural question that the report alone cannot answer: who, within the machinery of the British state, is actually capable of acting on a policy problem that crosses almost every departmental boundary?
The honest answer, on the evidence of recent years, is no one. The issue of young people classified as NEET falls across the Department for Education, the Treasury, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Business Department, the Department of Health and Social Care, alongside local government and combined ‘strategic’ authorities. Each owns a slice of the problem. Yet no single department ‘owns’ the whole problem. The Institute for Government’s reading of the report is unequivocal: tackling the challenge of NEETs will not be a priority for any single department unless the prime minister forces the issue. That is true, and is precisely the problem.
A solution whose only delivery mechanism is prime ministerial willpower is a diagnosis that depends on the one resource the British centre has precious little of. We know this because we have watched it happen. This government came to office with five missions at its heart. Missions are now barely mentioned, not because the analysis behind them was wrong, but because there was no institutional machinery to sustain cross-cutting action once ministerial attention has moved on.
You can improve what DfE or DWP measures but still watch the aggregate NEET number climb because the aggregate is no one’s target. The Milburn review will confront the same obstacles. Its recommendations in the autumn will have little impact unless the machinery is built to own the whole problem, sustaining action across departments and the political cycle.
The report offers several clues as to what a serious response would look like. The first is local. Milburn makes the case for local and regional leadership with solutions crafted to fit the context of place; the evidence supports him: NEET rates vary enormously, from around 1% of 16 and 17 year-olds in Barnet to over 20% in Dudley. The bodies best able to join up support, engage local employers and reach those facing the biggest barriers are mayors and local/combined authorities, not Whitehall.
Another clue is comparative. The report notes that the Dutch NEET rate is markedly lower than the UK’s. That difference is not explained by young people. It is the system around them. Policymakers in the Netherlands have created much more effective support mechanisms to get young people back into education, work and training, particularly those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
So the test for the autumn report will not be whether its recommendations as a whole are sensible and well considered. The issue is whether Milburn’s findings confront the structural question of who will own the problem in Whitehall, with what authority, accountable to whom, and sustained by what machinery when the next crisis pulls ministerial attention elsewhere?
If the answer is once again that the prime minister must make it a priority, the report will join a long line of excellent diagnoses that ultimately change little. Milburn has done the country a great service by setting out the scale of endemic failure. The tougher job is now to build the capacity and capability throughout the machinery of government to act on what he has found, forging a genuinely strategic state.