“This country is now facing the existential risk of a lost generation”. Those were the words of Alan Milburn, the Blairite former health minister, speaking in February about his ongoing review into ‘NEETs’: young people not in education, employment, or training.
The ‘Milburn Review’ is set to be released in the summer, with an interim report due later this spring. According to the most recent figures published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), almost one million 16-24 year olds in Britain (957,000) were in the category of NEET as of December 2025.
Milburn is not the first pro-capitalist commentator to raise the spectre of a ‘lost generation’ of young people. Following the 2007-09 financial crash and ensuing Great Recession, the term was regularly used in the capitalist media in Britain to refer to millions of young people who at that time were facing the brunt of rising unemployment, with youth unemployment peaking at a record high of 21.9% in 2011.
That was a generation entering the workforce in a period where the average annual growth in UK labour productivity had been just 0.4%, five times lower than in the three decades leading up to 2007. Now in their thirties and forties, they are the first in modern British history to be worse off than their parents’ generation: a consequence of a combination of more than 15 years of austerity, wage restraint, student debt, and the soaring cost of living, with working-class people forced to pay for the capitalists’ financial crisis and the anaemic growth that has persisted ever since.
It is also a generation that overwhelmingly voted for Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-austerity policies in the 2017 and 2019 general elections, while being significantly less enthusiastic for Keir Starmer’s firmly pro-big business, pro-war Labour Party in 2024.
In reality, what Milburn and the Labour government fear today is another generation of young people that could be increasingly ‘lost’ as productive material for capitalist profit-making, including a layer – both in and out of work – who could draw fundamental political conclusions about a system that can’t even guarantee the foundations for leading a decent and independent life.
The Milburn Review therefore hopes to find a way to integrate as many young people as possible into Britain’s capitalist economy, with the aim of boosting economic growth and increasing the pool of productive workers ‘paying into the system’. By supporting young people entering jobs, apprenticeships and training schemes, the review also aims to reduce state spending on welfare benefits that Labour ministers say young people would otherwise rely on.
Will the Milburn Review meet its aims? Going off what the Labour government has announced so far around jobs and education, it doesn’t look promising.
In December last year the government announced its ‘Youth Guarantee’, promising a “government-backed guaranteed job” for 55,000 young people who have been on universal credit for over 18 months. The scheme will be rolled out on a trial basis this spring, with 1,000 six-month work placements to be provided in the most “high-need” areas of Britain.
However, the Youth Guarantee is almost identical to the Tories’ ‘Kickstart’ scheme, launched in response to soaring youth unemployment during the Covid-19 pandemic. Kickstart was labelled “insufficient and flawed” by a National Audit Office report – but the scheme still ended up delivering three times more work placements than Labour’s Youth Guarantee is promising from the very start!
And like Kickstart, the Youth Guarantee will be a way for big business to profit from public money without spending a penny. The government has said it will pay businesses up to 25-hours per worker per week at the relevant age-related minimum wage for six months, plus a flat sum of £2,650 to cover ‘onboarding’ costs. So Labour wants to cut money off the youth benefits bill to effectively then hand over to billion-pound companies like Tesco and JD Sports. And there is no guarantee that a young person would continue to have a job at the end of six months, as shown by the 70% of the Kickstart cohort who did not continue with their employer after their placement had ended.
Milburn has conceded that the government “must go further” than the Youth Guarantee and “face up to the fact that there is a whole-system failure – in education, as much as in welfare, skills, and the labour market”. But the pitiful funding pledged for this scheme and the 350,000 other “training and workplace opportunities” – £820 million in total over the next four years – reflects the significant lack of room for manoeuvre for Labour or any government in this era acting in defence of decaying British capitalism.
The bosses are more than happy to accept government handouts, but it is a different story when it comes to investing their own profits back into hiring or training workers. For the 28th month in a row, the number of UK job opportunities in February fell, according to professional services firm KPMG. This trend hits the youngest hardest. In the same month, job search engine Adzuna reported less than 10,000 graduate jobs – a 45% decrease since last year.
Many employers are citing the elevated costs of National Insurance Contributions and the national minimum wage, which both increase in April. Under pressure from big business, there are rumours that Labour may delay or entirely abandon its manifesto pledge to “remove discretionary age bands” for 18-20 year olds.
Underlying these immediate financial pressures, however, are the capitalists’ even greater fears of what lies ahead for the global economy, with no signs of an end to volatility, especially following the latest war in the Middle East.
The Milburn Review won’t solve the scandal of decade-high youth unemployment. It won’t spell an end to low pay, bogus apprenticeships and training schemes, or university degrees that leave graduates with a lifetime of student debt, with no job to show for it. Labour’s plans will likely add to the deep sense of insecurity felt by millions of young people with disabilities or work-limiting health conditions in particular, who have been told they will have their access to benefits revoked if they refuse government-funded work and training opportunities “without good reason”.
By twenty-first century standards, Britain’s NEET-level as a share of the population aged 16-to-24 today (12.8%) is not exceptional, being less than it was in 2015 (12.9%) and 2005 (13.9%), for example. But the difference today compared to 2005 or even 2015 is that British capitalism now faces a more profound crisis – economically, but also politically, with the continued historic collapse of the two main traditional establishment parties.
The trade unions should be preparing now for an organised movement against the Milburn Review, which poses a threat to the pay and conditions of all workers. The TUC should also take immediate steps to enact the policy passed at its most recent conference, which calls on it “to organise a weekend demonstration against Labour austerity, as a launchpad for sustained trade union action in defence of workers and young people”.
A trade-union led movement should be organised around a programme that could guarantee the right to decent work for all, including sharing out the work across the economy, with a maximum working week of 32 hours and no loss of pay. That, combined with a mass trade union struggle for an immediate rise in the minimum wage to at least £15, with no youth exemptions, could ensure everyone has the right to full-time work on a real living wage.
Together with a major programme of increased government investment in public services and socially useful jobs, this would help eliminate unemployment as well as underemployment. Part of that mass public investment should include the creation of high-quality training schemes and apprenticeships under trade union pay and conditions, with a guaranteed job at the end.
Clearly the capitalist bosses, who claim they can’t even afford to pay the minimum wage, will not commit to such a transformative programme, although they could be forced to make some temporary concessions if a combative trade-union led movement was built. But the fight for lasting good jobs, education and training for all and a decent future for young people can only be guaranteed through a struggle for a socialist alternative, involving a democratic plan of production based on the needs of all, not the short-term profit interests of the bosses.
Adam Powell-Davies