Hannah Campbell is Business Development Director at Apprentify. She was Parliamentary candidate for Telford in 2024 and is currently the Regional Deputy Chairman (Political) for the West Midlands.
Britain now has more than one million young people not in education, employment or training.
According to the Office for National Statistics, 1,012,000 people aged 16 to 24 were NEET in the first quarter of 2026. That is 13.5 per cent of all young people, meaning more than one in eight are disconnected from both learning and work.
That should concern anyone who cares about Britain’s future.
Conservatives should recognise the scale of the challenge. Work is about far more than earning a wage. It provides purpose, responsibility, independence and dignity. It is often the foundation upon which people build confidence, families and successful lives.
A society that leaves more than one million young people without a clear route into employment is not creating opportunity. It is wasting potential.
The problem extends beyond the individuals affected. Businesses struggle to recruit the skills they need. Productivity suffers. Welfare costs rise. Economic growth becomes harder to achieve.
In short, Britain’s NEET crisis is not just a social problem. It is an economic one.
It is also a challenge to one of the central Conservative beliefs: that people should have the opportunity to improve their lives through work.
The Conservative tradition has always understood that work provides more than income. It creates structure, responsibility and self-reliance. It gives people a stake in society and a reason to believe that effort will be rewarded. That is why Conservatives have historically championed enterprise, home ownership and aspiration. Each depends upon people having a meaningful route into employment.
When young people spend months or years outside education and work, the consequences compound over time. Skills deteriorate, confidence declines and future employment becomes harder to secure. Research consistently shows that periods of worklessness early in life can have long-lasting effects on earnings, career progression and wellbeing.
This is why the current figures matter so much. More than one million young people are not merely absent from the labour market today. Many risk becoming permanently disconnected from it. The longer Britain tolerates that reality, the greater the economic and social costs will become.
Rebuilding those pathways requires a cultural shift as well as a policy shift. For years, success has been measured by participation in education rather than progression into employment. Schools are judged on academic outcomes. Universities are judged on enrolment. Yet too often we pay insufficient attention to whether young people ultimately secure rewarding careers.
We should be far more ambitious about creating routes into high-quality employment that do not require a traditional university degree. Apprenticeships, technical qualifications and employer-led training should be viewed not as alternatives to success, but as success in their own right.
The goal should not simply be to get young people into education. It should be to help them build productive, fulfilling and sustainable careers.
Recent evidence suggests the challenge is becoming more entrenched. Alan Milburn, the Government’s independent jobs tsar and former Labour Cabinet minister, warns that Britain is facing a growing generational divide in access to work.
Nearly 60 per cent of young people who are NEET are now economically inactive. They are not simply unemployed. They are not actively looking for work. At the same time, Milburn’s review found that six in ten young people who are NEET have never had a job, up from four in ten twenty years ago.
That should alarm policymakers across the political spectrum.
The first rung of the employment ladder is disappearing for too many young people before they have even had the chance to step onto it.
Yet while young people struggle to access work, employers continue to report significant skills shortages. The Department for Education’s Employer Skills Survey found that 27 per cent of vacancies are skill-shortage vacancies, rising to 45 per cent in construction.
We therefore face a remarkable contradiction. Employers cannot find the talent they need, while more than one million young people remain disconnected from employment and training.
That is not a functioning system.
Labour was elected on a promise of growth. Yet many of its decisions risk making this challenge harder to solve.
At precisely the moment Britain needs employers to create more opportunities for young people, the cost of employment is rising. A full-time employee working 37.5 hours per week on the National Living Wage now costs around £24,800 a year in wages alone before National Insurance, pensions and other employment costs are taken into account.
For large organisations these increases may be manageable. For many smaller employers, they make taking a chance on inexperienced workers a more difficult decision.
Every additional employment cost increases the perceived risk of hiring someone who requires training, support and development before becoming fully productive.
At the same time, the Government is withdrawing funding from key leadership and management apprenticeships, including Team Leader Level 3, Operations Manager Level 5 and Chartered Manager Degree Level 6 programmes.
This matters because strong management is one of the most important factors in helping young people succeed at work. Good managers develop talent, build confidence and create productive workplace cultures. Weak managers do the opposite.
If the Government is serious about getting more young people into work, it should be strengthening employers’ ability to develop talent, not weakening it.
The solution starts with recognising a simple truth: the answer will not come from Whitehall alone.
It will come from employers.
Businesses understand the skills they need. They understand workplace expectations. They know how to develop capability aligned to real economic demand. That is why apprenticeships remain one of the most effective ways to connect education directly to employment, enabling people to earn, learn and contribute from day one.
For too long, Britain has treated university as the default route to success while allowing technical and vocational pathways to be viewed as second best. Universities remain the right choice for many, but they are not the right answer for everyone.
We need a skills system that values routes into work as highly as routes into education.
We need policies that encourage employers to invest in young people rather than making employment more expensive.
And we need to rebuild the first rung of the employment ladder before another generation misses the opportunity to climb it.
More than one million young people outside education, employment or training is not an unfortunate statistic. It is a national failure.
Labour was elected on a promise to deliver growth. But growth is not created by government announcements. It is created when businesses invest, employ and develop people.
The test of government is not how often ministers talk about opportunity. It is how many opportunities they help create.
Hannah Campbell is Business Development Director at Apprentify. She was Parliamentary candidate for Telford in 2024 and is currently the Regional Deputy Chairman (Political) for the West Midlands.
Britain now has more than one million young people not in education, employment or training.
According to the Office for National Statistics, 1,012,000 people aged 16 to 24 were NEET in the first quarter of 2026. That is 13.5 per cent of all young people, meaning more than one in eight are disconnected from both learning and work.
That should concern anyone who cares about Britain’s future.
Conservatives should recognise the scale of the challenge. Work is about far more than earning a wage. It provides purpose, responsibility, independence and dignity. It is often the foundation upon which people build confidence, families and successful lives.
A society that leaves more than one million young people without a clear route into employment is not creating opportunity. It is wasting potential.
The problem extends beyond the individuals affected. Businesses struggle to recruit the skills they need. Productivity suffers. Welfare costs rise. Economic growth becomes harder to achieve.
In short, Britain’s NEET crisis is not just a social problem. It is an economic one.
It is also a challenge to one of the central Conservative beliefs: that people should have the opportunity to improve their lives through work.
The Conservative tradition has always understood that work provides more than income. It creates structure, responsibility and self-reliance. It gives people a stake in society and a reason to believe that effort will be rewarded. That is why Conservatives have historically championed enterprise, home ownership and aspiration. Each depends upon people having a meaningful route into employment.
When young people spend months or years outside education and work, the consequences compound over time. Skills deteriorate, confidence declines and future employment becomes harder to secure. Research consistently shows that periods of worklessness early in life can have long-lasting effects on earnings, career progression and wellbeing.
This is why the current figures matter so much. More than one million young people are not merely absent from the labour market today. Many risk becoming permanently disconnected from it. The longer Britain tolerates that reality, the greater the economic and social costs will become.
Rebuilding those pathways requires a cultural shift as well as a policy shift. For years, success has been measured by participation in education rather than progression into employment. Schools are judged on academic outcomes. Universities are judged on enrolment. Yet too often we pay insufficient attention to whether young people ultimately secure rewarding careers.
We should be far more ambitious about creating routes into high-quality employment that do not require a traditional university degree. Apprenticeships, technical qualifications and employer-led training should be viewed not as alternatives to success, but as success in their own right.
The goal should not simply be to get young people into education. It should be to help them build productive, fulfilling and sustainable careers.
Recent evidence suggests the challenge is becoming more entrenched. Alan Milburn, the Government’s independent jobs tsar and former Labour Cabinet minister, warns that Britain is facing a growing generational divide in access to work.
Nearly 60 per cent of young people who are NEET are now economically inactive. They are not simply unemployed. They are not actively looking for work. At the same time, Milburn’s review found that six in ten young people who are NEET have never had a job, up from four in ten twenty years ago.
That should alarm policymakers across the political spectrum.
The first rung of the employment ladder is disappearing for too many young people before they have even had the chance to step onto it.
Yet while young people struggle to access work, employers continue to report significant skills shortages. The Department for Education’s Employer Skills Survey found that 27 per cent of vacancies are skill-shortage vacancies, rising to 45 per cent in construction.
We therefore face a remarkable contradiction. Employers cannot find the talent they need, while more than one million young people remain disconnected from employment and training.
That is not a functioning system.
Labour was elected on a promise of growth. Yet many of its decisions risk making this challenge harder to solve.
At precisely the moment Britain needs employers to create more opportunities for young people, the cost of employment is rising. A full-time employee working 37.5 hours per week on the National Living Wage now costs around £24,800 a year in wages alone before National Insurance, pensions and other employment costs are taken into account.
For large organisations these increases may be manageable. For many smaller employers, they make taking a chance on inexperienced workers a more difficult decision.
Every additional employment cost increases the perceived risk of hiring someone who requires training, support and development before becoming fully productive.
At the same time, the Government is withdrawing funding from key leadership and management apprenticeships, including Team Leader Level 3, Operations Manager Level 5 and Chartered Manager Degree Level 6 programmes.
This matters because strong management is one of the most important factors in helping young people succeed at work. Good managers develop talent, build confidence and create productive workplace cultures. Weak managers do the opposite.
If the Government is serious about getting more young people into work, it should be strengthening employers’ ability to develop talent, not weakening it.
The solution starts with recognising a simple truth: the answer will not come from Whitehall alone.
It will come from employers.
Businesses understand the skills they need. They understand workplace expectations. They know how to develop capability aligned to real economic demand. That is why apprenticeships remain one of the most effective ways to connect education directly to employment, enabling people to earn, learn and contribute from day one.
For too long, Britain has treated university as the default route to success while allowing technical and vocational pathways to be viewed as second best. Universities remain the right choice for many, but they are not the right answer for everyone.
We need a skills system that values routes into work as highly as routes into education.
We need policies that encourage employers to invest in young people rather than making employment more expensive.
And we need to rebuild the first rung of the employment ladder before another generation misses the opportunity to climb it.
More than one million young people outside education, employment or training is not an unfortunate statistic. It is a national failure.
Labour was elected on a promise to deliver growth. But growth is not created by government announcements. It is created when businesses invest, employ and develop people.
The test of government is not how often ministers talk about opportunity. It is how many opportunities they help create.