By Eddie Barnes
The warning by former Labour Health Minister Alan Milburn today that Britain is breeding a “lost generation” of young people is absolutely correct.
By the end of this decade, according to his report into the challenges facing the country’s young people, there will be well over a million 16–24-year-olds out of work, education or training. That’s roughly one in six. Standing still. At the very moment in their lives when they should be spreading their wings, tens of thousands of young people in the UK face having to accept a curtailed life.
Mr Milburn, who was asked by the government to set out this review, said in a speech this morning that “the first rung of the career ladder has thinned” and that “for too may young people it is now simply out of reach”. He painted the “catch-22” which will be extremely familiar to many young people “where employers ask for work experience but the opportunities for young people to gain it have narrowed or gone.”
Mr Milburn put to bed the cruel caricature of Gen Z as a “snowflake generation”. They’re not. It’s something I’ve felt too in recent months. In the interviews and focus groups held by the John Smith Centre as part of our UK Youth Poll 2026, my reaction wasn’t to feel despair at their snow-flakery but awe at their resilience. Remarkably, as our poll found, a majority of young people continue to be optimistic about their futures. Seeing the flame of hope continuing to burn in the face of such fierce headwinds is genuinely inspiring.
This isn’t a generation opting to sit on the couch: Mr Milburn’s report shows that 84% of young people out of work or training want to work. The problem, as he puts it, is that the first rung on the career ladder is simply out of reach. There are, he notes, 1.6 million fewer entry level jobs today than there were at the start of the century. We simply aren’t offering opportunities for young people to get going.
This is feeding through into the data. Earlier this week, Lord Wolfson, the boss of clothes store Next, disclosed that whereas in 2024 his firm received ten applications for every job, that had risen to 19 just two years later. Meanwhile, YouGov has found that the number of young people who say it is difficult to get a job has doubled in 15 months. Our own UK Youth Poll also demonstrated how job insecurity has become one of the key worries that young people take with them. Youth unemployment is now a real and present crisis across Britain.
“This is the cause”, Mr Milburn says today. And he is surely correct. Giving Britain’s young people a future again could and should be the animating purpose behind whatever refreshed government emerges from Labour’s current leadership crisis – and one in which all parties can contribute towards fixing.
Doing so would show a desire to stand by the basic social contract between young and old. As our poll found, in the space of the last year, the number of young people who think their lives will be better than their parents’ has collapsed. It is now barely over a third, It’s a shocking figure but it’s surely not surprising. For this is – as Wes Streeting noted last week – the first time in our country’s history that the next generation are facing worse prospects than the last. We can’t carry on like this. Seeking to pass on better times to those who come after us is at the core of any functioning society.
I’d also argue that a focus on the needs of younger generations is a good guide towards creating better policy. By definition, putting the needs of young people first is to turn away from a politics of short-term bungs and fixes and to focus on long-term strategy. It is to consider the life span of a person, not just the life span of a parliament. It invites better questions. Like: how do we create an education system that prepares people for the world of work? What kind of skills are necessary in a fast-changing world where AI is ripping up everything? How do we create a welfare system that is, in Mr Milburn’s phrase, a “springboard” not just a safety net? What are the growth-creating policies that can deliver more jobs for young people entering the labour market? In short, to ‘youth-proof’ policy is to create good policy.
We now know the cost of failing to act: a million young people – or twice the population of Edinburgh – out of work, training or education. That’s surely a cost we shouldn’t be prepared to accept.
