It’s an ugly acronym. And it’s an even uglier situation.
The reality of so-called “Neets” in the UK – young people who haven’t got jobs, aren’t studying or being trained up – has seen hundreds upon hundreds of thousands in their late teens or early-20s struggle to find a decent future for well over a decade.
It costs the taxpayer billions. And the human cost is variously described as a disaster, a national shame, even a moral crisis.
When the phrase Neet was first coined by Tony Blair’s Downing Street in 1999, the focus was on 170,000 or so teenagers who were not in education, employment or training. After many attempts at solving the problem, add in a pandemic and years of a sluggish economy, it’s acute – with nearly a million under-25s in that situation.
A tome full of proposals to try and fix it once and for all will be published on Tuesday, after a year in the making.
How the government reacts will test its appetite and capacity for radical change, and the prime minister’s real, not rhetorical, hunger for tricky political arguments.
The canny smooth talker behind the huge review, former Labour MP Alan Milburn, wants you to know that Andy Burnham knows exactly what’s coming.
Speaking to me in Liverpool, where in Merseyside 14.5% of 16 to 24-year-olds are unemployed,, external he tells me: “All the way through, the prime minister, the chancellor, all the ministers, they know what’s going on. It won’t be a surprise to them when this is launched and that gives it a fighting chance of actually being implemented.”
But his collection of proposals is not for the faint-hearted.
On top of a plan to stop under-25s claiming the main sickness and disability benefits, Milburn will argue for a dramatic shift in the balance of what the taxpayer spends on benefits for young people compared with what is spent on support to help them get into work.
He says the amount spent on young people’s benefits is 25 times as much as that on employment support – and he wants to shift it to a drastically different two to one.
He won’t put specific numbers on it yet, but accepts openly that means a significant number of young people losing their benefits or facing cuts.
But that would come with a chunky expansion of the amount of further education, training, health support and likely jobs subsidised by the taxpayer too. A big cut to state support on one side of the ledger, but a big increase on the other.
And to make sure that government gets really serious about improving the mess, Milburn is asking for a new law that would give young people a guarantee of help and support – a job, an apprenticeship, a training place, or perhaps health treatment so they are able to work – an “opportunity guarantee”.
He told me he won’t fall into the “elephant’s trap”, where a feisty teenager could sue the prime minister if they didn’t get the job they fancied. But the idea is to put a legal duty on the authorities in a similar vein to councils’ obligation to look after children in care, or to provide accommodation or advice to homeless people.
