Q: Why has the problem got worse in the UK compared to other countries?

Milburn said this had been a problem for years. It was a structural issue.

The easiest thing is to do the blame game. Everybody wants to blame everybody. You know blame the smartphones, blame the parents, blame the benefit system, blame the employers, blame the politicians.

Fine. But that doesn’t get you anywhere. It really doesn’t.

You’ve got to understand what the hell is going on, why it’s getting worse, not better.

You got to take a systems-wide view of it.

And what is unique about what we tried to do here is we’ve tried to look at it through a systems lens, both on the supply side and the demand side.

And that will point us to getting answers that are sustainable.

Q: [From the Mirror] Is instability in the Labour party making this situation worse?

Milburn jokes about that being outside his terms of reference, “thank God”.

But he says this is a problem all the political parties need to address.

If politics can’t get its act together and deal with the future of this generation, then honestly, people will take a view about politics, which is that it’s not working. And when that happens, bad things happen.

So my view is that, whatever happens, whoever’s around, whoever’s up, who’s down, whoever’s in power, this is an issue that is not going to go away. The question is, is somebody going to lean into it and solve it?

Milburn says young people have been hit by a perfect storm.

A generation ago almost 2 in 3 of this age cohort were in work.

Today, it’s barely 50% for under 18s.

In education, the number also holding down a job has halved during that time.

Now, there’s been much focus about the impact on youth employment of recent policies like the youth minimum wage and the rise in national insurance contributions.

Employers repeatedly raised this with me as an issue, and it is true; the changes have had an impact. It’s always a risk for an employer to take on a young person precisely because they’re unproven.

So if public policy wants more young people in work, it has to minimise risks and maximise opportunity incentives for employers.

But no one should pretend that the structural change that has been taking place in the youth labour market has only recently been triggered.

Over the last few decades, Britain has had jobs boom, but one that has largely passed.

Young people’s entry level jobs have long been in sharp decline compared to the start of the century. There are 1.6 million fewer low and medium skilled jobs in the economy. Vacancies in hospitality have halved in the last four years. Saturday jobs have long since been in freefall. Apprenticeship starts amongst young people have fallen by 35% over the last decade.

The first rung of the ladder in careers has thinned for too many young but is now simply out of reach.

That places them in a hopeless catch-22 position where employers ask for work experience, but opportunities for young people to gain it have either narrowed or have gone.

Milburn said his team spoke to countless organisations when they produced this report.

I’ve been around politics and public policy for more decades than I care to remember. I can genuinely say I’ve never come across an issue as visceral as this with the public.

Wherever I’ve been, whoever I’ve spoken to. I’ve come across a deep concern bordering on a fear about the future facing young people.

Parents are more worried than ever about their kids. Grandparents, too, about their youngsters’ prospects for a job, a home, a decent future.

For decades in Britain, the foundation of our unwritten social contract has been that each generation would be able to do better than the last.

That great British promise for this generation is being broken.

Milburn said this was more than just a financial crisis.

There is much talk, of course, of this being an economic or a fiscal crisis.

And indeed it is. The cumulative cost to our country of almost one million young people outside of education and work is estimated in my report at £125bn a year – more than we spend on education.

But the principal cost isn’t borne by the taxpayer. It’s borne by the young person.

Being Neet has a long term scarring impact – cost to their confidence, cost of their health, cost to their future income.

For those who spend the whole period from 18 to 24 years of age outside of education and work – as about a quarter of 24 year old Neets do – the lifetime loss can approach £300,000.

That is not an abstract number. It’s a deposit never saved, a home never bought, a pension never built, the hope of a good life never realised.

So this is more than an economic crisis. It’s a moral one.

Milburn said he thought every young person had something to offer.

When Pat [McFadden] first asked me to do this work. I came to it with this view. Every young person has something to give the scale and aptitude of potential.

Every one of them should have an opportunity to learn or to earn.

He said youth unemployment had been a problem for a long time.

The Neet [not in education, employment or training] rate in our country has barely been below 10% in 25 years. It’s one thing to be ignorant about a problem. It’s quite another to be neglectful.

And I’m sad to say that for far too long in our country, the Neet crisis has been swept under the carpet.

Not any longer. This review exists because today Britain faces a genuine generational faultline.

But the problem was getting worse, he said.

We do not just have a chronic problem, it is getting worse, not getting better.

And we have neither a system or a plan to deal with it.

A decade or more ago, the problem was temporary youth unemployment. And youth unemployment today is still, of course, far too high.

But now it is something deeper and far more corrosive. It is youth detachment from the labour market. Nearly six in 10 young people who are Neet today are economically inactive. That means they not only don’t have a job, they’re not looking for a job.

Six in 10 have never had a job. 20 years ago, that figure was closer to four in 10.

Detachment is no longer temporary for too many young people, it is becoming permanent.

If the current trajectory continues within five years, we forecast in this report that today’s one in eight young people who are Neet will climb to one in six.

We are at risk of a lost generation.

Alan Milburn is speaking now.

He says the Neet crisis is “probably the most significant challenge facing our country today”.

New figures released showing that there are now over one million young people in our country not in education, employment or training.

It’s actually more than a statistic. It’s a warning. A warning that far too many young people are reaching adulthood only to find the door to opportunity closed, then Neet.

It’s an ugly term, but it’s a term with ugly consequences – aspirations thwarted, confidence drained, futures narrowed before they’ve properly begun.

Zack Polanski, the Green party leader, has said the amount of scrutiny he gets from the media is “incredibly disproportionate” compared to the attention given to the Reform UK leader Nigel Farage.

He was speaking in an interview with Rob Powell from Sky News, who quizzed on some of the embarrassing revelations that have come out about him in the media recently.

The rightwing papers have been particularly hostile, and Powell pointed out that some of the things said by the Green party in response to queries about Polanski’s houseboat, and whether he voted in the local elections, were not true.

Polanski said he wanted to build trust with the public.

He went on:

There’s an easy narrative here to say he’s not telling the truth, but what I would also say similarly, I think if you pick someone apart enough on very, very minute things and trivial things, you can start to paint a picture of someone that isn’t true.

It’s right that I’m scrutinised. It’s right that I’m asked questions, but also the disproportionality of which I’m scrutinised … I think I can say very clearly that if you compare the scrutiny that I receive compared to what Reform receives, it’s incredibly disproportionate.

I should receive scrutiny – as should Nigel Farage.

Alan Milburn signalled this morning that he favours a social media ban on children under the age of 16.

In an interview with LBC, he said he was alarmed by the number of young people who do not sleep properly because of “doomscrolling”.

He said:

This is an anxious generation for a whole variety of reasons, it’s a world of uncertainty, opportunities are lower, in the way they’re described. They’re living in the digital age.

I’ve had a small team going around the country talking to these young people, these Neet young people and they do this exercise where they ask them what time did you go to sleep last night?

2 o’clock, 3 o’clock, 4 o’clock, 5 o’clock, sometimes never. This is a generation that are doomscrolling in their bedrooms on their phones.

Asked if he favoured a social media ban for under-16s, Milburn replied:

We’ve really got to look at that. The government is looking at that. If the government hasn’t pronounced on it by the time I come to report in the autumn, I definitely will.

The government has just this week concluded a consultation on a social media ban for under-16s. Keir Starmer says there will be action, although it is not clear yet whether that will include a full ban.

UPDATE: Sophy Ridge says they asked Milburn about this on Sky too.

Very interesting to hear Alan Milburn on social media ban - ‘the evidence points in one direction’

And he says of Keir Starmer - “I know this is an issue he is really bothered about. The question is not are you bothered, are you going to do something about it?’

Milburn says he’s talked to young people who go to sleep at “2, 4, 5am - sometimes never” because they’re scrolling on their phones

“The distress is real amongst young people, and it is leading to functional impairment. This is a real thing. It’s not a fake thing. They’re not making it up. This is a more anxious generation.”

Graeme Wearden writes the Guardian’s business live blog.

The number of young people in the UK not in education, employment or training (Neets) has risen over one million, for the first time in over a decade.

The Office for National Statistics has just reported that there were 1,012,000 young people, between the ages of 16 and 24, who were ‘Neet’ in January to March 2026.

That’s an increase of 89,000 over the last year, and 55,000 more than in the previous quarter.

That’s a timely example of the growing Neets crisis, as Alan Milburn releases his report into the situation today.

There is more on this story on the business blog here.

Richard Dearlove, a former head of MI6, has said it would have been “totally impossible” for the Foreign Office to put in place mitigations to manage Peter Mandelson’s associations with senior figures in China, Russia and Israel when he was the UK’s ambassador to the US. He was speaking to the Guardian in response to our revelations yesterday about the reasons by UK Security Vetting argued that Mandelson should be refused security vetting. Paul Lewis, Pippa Crerar and Henry Dyer have the story.

In other Mandelson news, the Telegraph says that the government will publish his communications with ministers and officials while he was ambassador next week. This is the latest batch of information being released under the terms of a Commons humble address and we’ve been told there will be a huge volume of documents released. It will be the biggest government data drop since the multi-volume Chilcot report into the Iraq war.

In their story, Tony Diver and Janet Eastham also say that Mandelson advised numerous cabinet ministers on how they should do their jobs. They report:

The Telegraph understands that the disgraced peer often messaged senior Labour politicians and officials with suggestions on how to conduct official business far outside his remit as Britain’s ambassador to the US.

The messages are expected to be published next week alongside thousands of pages of material about his appointment, vetting and communications.

Whitehall sources said the advice was “mostly unsolicited” and that Lord Mandelson was not usually consulted by members of Sir Keir Starmer’s Cabinet on policy issues unless they related to the US.

This will come as no surprise to people who know Mandelson, or indeed any high-ego political figures. On his Political Currency podcast with George Osborne, Ed Balls was recently discussing Keir Starmer’s decision to appoint Gordon Brown as an adviser on international finance. Balls said Brown’s advice was always worth hearing, but he sounded sceptical about whether the appointment would change much. All prime ministers were used to getting advice from Brown on international finance, he said – whether they wanted it or not.

Britain is “sleepwalking into a food crisis” caused by extreme weather, inflation and the impacts of the Iran war – and the government is failing to take the threat seriously, food experts have said. Fiona Harvey has the story.

Today we are expected to get Andy Burnham’s considered response to Tony Blair’s critique of Labour published yesterday. Wes Streeting, the former health secretar who, like Burnham, is also pitching to be next Labour leader, published his rebuttal in a Guardian article last night.

Here’s an extract.

Labour succeeds when it combines dynamism with fairness, wealth creation with wealth distribution, enterprise with solidarity, ambition with security. The centre-left’s task is not simply to speak the language of markets more fluently than the Conservatives. It is to ensure markets serve society rather than dominate it.

This challenge is not only domestic. The international order itself is fragmenting. The institutions built after 1945 increasingly struggle to regulate a world defined by multinational technology firms, climate pressures and resurgent authoritarianism. It remains unclear whether democracy or tyranny will define the 21st century …

The future belongs to those prepared to harness change in the service of justice. That is the real dividing line in modern politics: between those who believe the future can still be shaped democratically for the common good – and those content to leave it to markets, monopolies and fate. The answers must be new, but they must also be Labour.

And here is the full article.

Good morning. For the second day in a row, the Westminster news is dominated by the thoughts of a leading Labour figure from the Tony Blair era. But this time it’s an intervention commissioned, and welcomed, by Keir Starmer’s government. Alan Milburn, who has health secretary under Tony Blair, once seen as a future PM, and later chair of the Social Mobility Commisson, was asked last year to lead a review into why the number of young people not in education, employment or training (Neets) is rising. Today he is publishing his first “diagnostic” report, focusing on the causes of the problem. A second report, focusing on policy recommendations, is due in the autumn.

As Richard Partington reports, Milburn says Britain risks a 25% rise in the number of Neets, to 1.25 million by the early 2030s, without urgent government action to avoid a “lost generation”.

Milburn is publishing the full report, which runs to more than 200 pages and which is described by people who have read it as exceptionally thorough and hard-hitting, at a press conference this morning.

In the meantime, he has been giving interviews on the morning news shows. Inevitably, Milburn, who was a leading Blairite in the last Labour government (when the cabinet was factionally divided, and many ministers sided with Gordon Brown) was asked about his former boss’s essay published yesterday. Milburn did not get drawn into all the arguments in Blair’s essay, but he did say that he agreed with the former PM about the need to review some of the government policies that reduced the willingness of firms to hire young people.

In an interview on Times Radio, asked if he ageed with Blair that Labour had created a “climate of difficulty” for business to create entry-level jobs with an increase to the minimum wage and workers rights bill, Milburn replied:

Well, certainly every employer that we spoke to raised these issues as real concerns, the minimum wage. No employer really wants to be paying poverty wages to young people, that’s not what you come across.

But there is, particularly in low-margin sectors of the economy, like retail and hospitality, there is no doubt that these changes have had an impact. So that is something the government really needs to think about. If the priority is to create young people’s jobs, then it’s got to create the right conditions for employers to do so.

And, in an interview on the Today programme, Milburn was asked if he was willing to ask government to “think again” about the rise in employer national insurance, and the increase in the minimum wage. Milburn replied:

Yes, I am … Every employer that I talk to, they will say the same thing. There’s no doubt that the changes that were made a couple of years ago have had an impact on employers.

Here is the agenda for the day.

9.30am: The ONS publishes its latest figures on young people not in education, employment or trainining (Neets). It is also publishing figures on personal wellbeing.

11am: Alan Milburn holds a press conference to mark the publication of his report on young people and work.

Noon: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, takes questions from MSPs.

Afternoon: Keir Starmer is on a visit meeting apprentices in London, where he is expected to speak to broadcasters.

Afternoon: Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester and Labour candidate in the Makerfield byelection, is expected to deliver a response to Tony Blair’s ‘Labour and the future’ essay.

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