As many readers will have spotted, Claudi lives and works in Scotland, but her lived experience and powerful analysis is just as relevant to people here in the West Country.
The government has spent the last few days wringing its hands about “NEETs.” If you’ve not come across the term, NEET means Not in Education, Employment or Training — young people aged 16 to 24 who aren’t in school, college, university, an apprenticeship, a training course, or a job.
The new figures landed this morning, and they are grim. For the first time since 2013, the number has passed ONE MILLION.
1,012,000 young people. That’s 13.5 per cent of everyone aged 16 to 24 in this country. Up 89,000 in a single year. Economic inactivity among them is at its highest since 2001. The highest level since records began in 1992.
Now let me tell you what that statistic actually looks like. Not from a spreadsheet. From my chair.
This is what one million looks like from where I sit
Every Monday and Tuesday I work at the Middlefield Project here in Aberdeen. And a lot of the people who come through my door for advice are youngsters — 17, 18, 19, right up to 22.
And it breaks my heart. Because so many of them are TRYING. Genuinely, desperately trying. And they are getting absolutely NOWHERE.
Let me give you some real examples, and then you tell me these kids are “lazy.”
A boy sat in front of me who had been dumped by his school and told — told, to his face, by a teacher — “you’ll end up a criminal, because you’re too stupid for anything.” Read that again. A grown adult, a teacher, said that to a child. Imagine being fifteen years old and carrying those words around inside you for the rest of your life. Is it any wonder he ended up NEET? They didn’t fail to educate him. They actively crushed him.
Girls who were bullied at school so relentlessly that they simply stopped going — because the school either couldn’t, or wouldn’t, lift a finger to protect them. They didn’t drop out because they’re work-shy. They fled. They walked away from their own education to save themselves, because not one adult in that building did their job.
And so they arrive at my desk not even knowing where to start. How do you apply for a job? How do you fill in a college form for a basic course? What do you do in an interview? The very first rung on the ladder — and nobody, in their entire lives, has ever shown them.
Now — I can already hear some of you. “Their parents could help. Their teachers could help. Somebody could help.”
Could they? Let’s be honest with ourselves for one minute.
Is the lad who was told by his teacher that he’s “too stupid for anything” going to walk back into that school and ask that same teacher for help with his CV and his interview practice? Would you?
Is the girl who was bullied for years — while the school looked the other way and did nothing — going to suddenly trust those same people to guide her future? Why in God’s name would she? They had their chance to be on her side. They chose not to take it.
THAT is what the politicians and the headline-writers will never understand. These young people have not “opted out.” They have been let down so badly, so young, by the very institutions that were supposed to lift them up, that they have stopped believing a single soul is on their side. By the time they reach me, they are not lazy. They are exhausted, frightened, and convinced they are worthless — because somebody told them they were.
My job, and the job of places like the Middlefield Project, is to be the first person in a very long time who is actually on their side.
So before we let the GB News mob tell you a million young people are “work-shy” and “addicted to their phones” — let’s look at what is ACTUALLY driving this. Because I see it every single week, and it is NOT laziness.
Cause one: a mental health crisis no-one is treating
The proportion of NEET young people with a likely mental health condition has DOUBLED in fifteen years — from 30% in 2009-10 to 60% in 2023-24. More than half of NEETs in England have a health condition of some kind.
Why? A generation that came of age through austerity, a pandemic that robbed them of two years of school and social development, social media pressure their parents never faced — and then, when they reach out for help, an NHS mental health system so overstretched the waiting lists run into years. A young person with crippling anxiety can’t just “pull themselves together” while they wait 18 months for an appointment that may never come.
Cause two: the entry level job has vanished
Job vacancies are at their lowest in five years. And the jobs that have gone first are exactly the ones young people USED to start out in. More than half of all jobs lost since the last Budget were in hospitality — pubs, cafés, restaurants — the traditional first rung on the ladder for any 16-to-24-year-old.
The rise in employer National Insurance and wage costs meant businesses stopped hiring the inexperienced and the young first. (We’ve all watched the self-checkout posts — same story.) The bottom rung of the ladder has been sawn off, and then we wonder why young people can’t climb it.
Cause three: poverty
Young people from the poorest households are three and a half times more likely to be NEET than those from the richest. This is not about character. It’s about whether your family could afford the bus fare, the laptop, the interview clothes, the unpaid internship, the rent while you train. Opportunity in this country is bought, not earned — and a million young people simply can’t afford the entry fee.
Cause four: apprenticeships and training gutted
The proper, funded routes into a trade — the apprenticeships that used to take a school-leaver and turn them into a skilled, employed adult — have been hollowed out over a decade. The opportunities my older clients had at sixteen simply don’t exist for their grandchildren.
And now – what has Brexit got to do with it?
More than the government will ever admit. Here’s the bit nobody connects up.
We took away their escape route. Before Brexit, any young Brit who couldn’t find work or opportunity here had the entire continent open to them. Freedom of movement meant a 22-year-old from Aberdeen could go and work in a bar in Barcelona, pick fruit in France, teach English in Berlin, wait tables in Amsterdam, build a CV, learn a language, grow up a bit, and come home employable. That valve is gone. When there are no opportunities at home, our young people can no longer simply go and find them abroad. They’re trapped here, in a shrinking jobs market.
We pulled them out of Erasmus+ — and only now are we crawling back. For decades, hundreds of thousands of UK students, apprentices and learners studied, trained and worked across Europe at no extra cost through Erasmus+ (between 2014 and 2020 alone, over 128,000 UK participants). Boris Johnson scrapped it in the Brexit deal, calling it poor value, and replaced it with the much smaller, non-reciprocal Turing Scheme. The result: a whole avenue of education and training — the “T” and the “E” in NEET — switched off for British youngsters for SIX YEARS. The good news, and credit where it’s due, is that the UK has now agreed to REJOIN Erasmus+ from January 2027, signed in Brussels in April. Over 100,000 young people a year are expected to benefit. But look at what it tells you: we spent six years locked out of a scheme that helps exactly the young people now sitting in the NEET figures — and we’re paying around £570 million a year to rejoin something we were inside of for free as EU members. That is the Brexit story in miniature: smash something that worked, watch a generation pay the price, then quietly pay through the nose to undo it.
We shrank the whole economy they’re trying to enter. The government’s own Office for Budget Responsibility says Brexit has permanently cut UK productivity by 4% and trade by 15%. A smaller, poorer economy creates fewer jobs, fewer apprenticeships, fewer opportunities — and the people at the very start of their working lives are always hit first and hardest when the pie shrinks.
And the EU has offered to help even more — twice. Brussels has repeatedly offered a wider youth mobility scheme that would let 18-to-30-year-olds live, work and study across the Channel again, both ways. Successive UK governments — Tory AND Labour — have been too frightened of the word “Brexit” to grab it in full, in case anyone accuses them of bringing back freedom of movement. So our young people stay largely locked out, to protect a political slogan.
What is the government actually doing?
They’ve launched a review (led by Alan Milburn, reporting this summer) and announced a “Youth Guarantee” — a paid placement for anyone NEET for over 18 months. Sounds reasonable. Except the sting in the tail is that young people who refuse can have their benefits sanctioned. Disability charities like Scope have rightly pointed out that you cannot sanction a sick or disabled young person into a job that doesn’t exist, and that the real barriers — health, transport, cost, the missing jobs themselves — have to be tackled first.
And of course, the usual suspects are already out blaming the young men themselves — gaming, phones, pornography — anything rather than admit the ladder has been pulled up and the doors to Europe slammed shut.
The bottom line
A million young people are not lazy. They are sick and untreated. They are poor and priced out. They are skilled-up with nowhere to go, or unskilled with no apprenticeship to go to. They’ve been written off by schools, bullied out of classrooms, told they’re worthless before they even got started. And they have had an entire continent of opportunity — work, study, travel, growth — taken away from them by a Brexit they were mostly too young to even vote for.
That last point deserves a moment. The 16-to-24-year-olds who are NEET today were aged between 6 and 14 at the 2016 referendum. They didn’t vote for any of this. It was done to them. And now they’re being lectured about it by the very people who did it.
We took their future and handed them the bill. The very least we owe them is the honesty to admit it — and the decency to start fixing it.
