Former health secretary Alan Milburn has blamed the lack of an effective cross-government approach for the rising numbers of young people who are not in education, employment or training.
The interim findings of Milburn’s independent review of so-called NEETs says nearly one million people aged 16-24 currently fall into that category, and that the situation is a worsening “moral crisis”.
Work and pensions secretary Pat McFadden commissioned the review last year. Milburn’s initial observations highlight the lack of a discernible national policy framework for dealing with non-participation in education or work, even though the estimated cumulative annual cost of NEETs at current levels is £125bn.
A breakdown of the £125bn figure apportions £63bn to “scarring economic potential lost” and £38bn to “direct economic potential lost”. A further £15bn is attributed to “scarring tax revenue and benefit spend”; £3.2bn is estimated to be lost in income tax receipts and national insurance contributions.
The review says the true cost to government of youth disengagement is “easy to miss” because it does not sit with just one part of government.
“It is spread across benefits, lower tax receipts, health spending, housing support, local services and, in some cases, the justice system,” the review says.“That matters because no single department sees the full picture, and no single department is forced to carry the full consequences of failure. But the costs are real nonetheless, and they accumulate across the state.”
Milburn lauds individual departmental initiatives but stresses that they lack a holistic view.
“Different Whitehall departments pursue their own strategies and develop their own plans, his review says. “It is welcome of course that the DfE is focusing more on tackling educational inequality, that the Department for Work and Pensions is rolling out an enhanced Youth Guarantee, that the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has developed a youth strategy and that the Department for Health and Social Care is testing new approaches for how the NHS can tackle economic inactivity.
“But there is little, if anything, that joins the dots. It does not feel like this has been a top priority for government and nor is there a mission-based approach to dealing with the problem.”
Milburn’s interim review says that while the education system has enough data to know which young people are at risk of becoming NEET, it does not have “the architecture, the funding or the accountability” to act on what it knows.
“Schools are measured by exam results, not by whether young people end up in work,” it says. “Colleges are funded for enrolment, not for sustained destinations. Careers guidance is a statutory duty without enforcement, and work experience is haphazard.”
The interim review says that if current trends persist, one in 20 of today’s five-year-olds will be on incapacity benefit by the time they reach 22. It notes that although the National Health Service does not see itself as “part of the participation system”, it has a core role in dealing with the NEET crisis.
“It commissions its own services, sets its own priorities, measures its own activity and reports to its own regulators,” the review says of the NHS. “It does not routinely ask whether a young person is in education or work. It does not share data with schools, colleges or Jobcentres as a matter of course. It does not treat participation as a clinical outcome.”
The review says that while regional mayors have been given powers over adult skills, transport and economic development, they do not have control over schools, welfare design, the benefits system or NHS commissioning boundaries.
As a result, Milburn argues that increased devolution has “added actors” to the cast of organisations tasked with dealing with the NEETs crisis “without resolving the core problem of ownership”.
“There is a strong case for local leadership to address the NEET crisis,” the review says. “Labour markets are local. Transport is local. Employer relationships are local. The barriers young people face are strongly shaped by place. But devolution has created partial responsibility without full control.”
Among his interim conclusions, Milburn states that a better-coordinated response across government is required.
“Welfare reform on its own will not solve the crisis in youth participation,” the review says. “But nor will reforms in schools, skills, health and work succeed if the welfare system continues to pull in the opposite direction.
“These reforms need to reinforce each other. A welfare system that supports participation must be part of that wider shift if the welfare state is to become a working state.”
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme yesterday, work and pensions secretary McFadden said solving the problems outlined by Milburn “should be a national cause”, and that levels of young people signed off as unfit to work was a clear issue.
“We’ve got a big problem and a deep-seated problem and I think we need a big response to it, not only from my department but from right across government and, beyond that, from the worlds of education and from business and from the whole country,” he said.
“We have got to give young people a chance to show what they can do. Show them that we believe in them, we back them, we want them to have a better future.”
Milburn’s final report is due to be published later this year.