Held back by Covid and then phased out by AI, Britain’s so-called Neets are desperately seeking a secure future. Who will offer them hope?
Another week, another set of sobering economic numbers. Last Thursday, the Office for National Statistics published its latest quarterly estimate of the number of 16- to 24-year-olds who are so-called Neets – people not in education, employment or training. As usual, experts have warned that figures extracted from the UK’s flawed labour force survey should be taken with a pinch of salt. But there was still universal agreement about the huge issues the figures highlighted, and the hundreds of thousands of young people, 946,000, if the stats are to be believed, who are living on the UK’s social and economic edge.
The government has announced its latest review of all this, led by the New Labour veteran Alan Milburn, who will apparently focus on the relevance of disability and mental health. This week, moreover, Rachel Reeves is reportedly going to make the predicament of Neets one of the big themes of her budget. As ever, mood music is being provided by parts of the media that tend to specialise in the kind of condescension and generational loathing recently crystallised by a Daily Mail headline that might easily have been coughed out by ChatGPT: “Sicknote youths to dodge clampdown: Pledge to stop benefits for the workshy won’t include those with anxiety”.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
