The Milburn Review interim report: our analysis
Action for Children's Senior Policy Advisor, Scott Compton, explores where the interim report of Alan Milburn’s Young People and Work Review is strongest, and where it falls short on welfare.
The interim report of Alan Milburn’s Young People and Work Review is a serious and unflinching assessment of why more than one million young people are not in education, employment or training (NEET).
In this blog, I set out where the report is strongest, and where its analysis, particularly on welfare, is a bit less convincing.
What are NEETs?
NEET is an economic and statistical acronym for young people (typically aged 16 to 24) who are “Not in Education, Employment or Training”.
While we use the term in this blog to maintain consistency with the report and national data standards, we acknowledge its limitations as a potentially stigmatising social label that oversimplifies young people’s diverse life situations and the structural barriers they face.
The UK is now second only to Romania in its NEET rate, but this is not a new failure - as the report highlights, we have never been a strong performer in this area.
Milburn’s central argument is that this is about much more than recent trends or policy changes, but decades of structural dysfunction across education, health, welfare and employment support.
The roots of the NEET challenge run both wide and deep. As the report rightly states, this often begins in early childhood, shaped by poverty and the increasingly difficult material conditions in which many children are growing up.
Care-experienced young people are identified as a group at particularly acute risk of disengagement, noting how support and stability fall away “at precisely the moment they are most needed”. Our own recent research on care leavers’ employment barriers reinforces exactly this finding.
Crucially, Milburn and the accompanying Inside the Mind of a NEET report dismantle some of the more damaging narratives in this space. This is not a story of individual failure, or a generation lacking ambition or resilience.
Survey data for the review found that 84% of NEET young people want to find a job, education or training, a figure that should put to rest the caricature of a snowflake generation with no interest in hard work.
Most significantly, the report centres employers and the demand side of the labour market, highlighting fewer entry-level roles, declining apprenticeship starts (down over 40% for young people in a decade) and higher qualification requirements that have kicked away the first rungs of the career ladder. This was a big theme in our submission to the review, and it is the right diagnosis.
The report’s emphasis on the need for a big offer for young people focused on early intervention, high-quality employment support and opportunity creation points in the right direction, and to areas where organisations like Action for Children have many years’ experience and much to contribute.
Action for Children contributed directly to the review through the call for evidence, convening focus groups between young people and the Review team, producing new research on care leavers’ employment barriers and by coordinating influencing work across the sector to make the case for protecting the Universal Credit (UC) health element as a vital safeguard for disabled young people.
It is on this last point, the social security system, where some of the report’s analysis falters.
Where is the report’s analysis weaker?
Benefits vs employment support
One of the report’s headline findings is that for every £25 spent on benefits for young people, just £1 goes on employment support, and that only around one in five young NEETs currently receive meaningful employment support from the social security system at all.
While the point is intended to highlight an imbalance, it risks leading the debate in an unhelpful direction by implying that simply rebalancing existing spending is the solution. Cutting benefits to fund employment support won’t address the underlying drivers, it will simply deepen hardship and push more young people into poverty.
The role of incentives in the welfare system
Throughout the welfare chapter, the idea of ‘perverse incentives’ does a great deal of heavy lifting. The suggestion is that the system’s design is actively encouraging young people to claim and remain on health-related benefits rather than participate in work or training.
There is certainly truth in the observation that the binary nature of the system leaves too many young people disconnected from opportunities for support and participation. But such narrow framing reduces disabled young people to mere economic units responding to financial signals, rather than individuals with severe and often complex needs navigating a genuinely difficult system.
This matters because claiming the UC health element or PIP is not the straightforward option this framing implies. The assessment process is lengthy, frequently wrong and often degrading, regularly denying support to people with severe impairments. For many young people, claiming is an act of persistence in the face of significant adversity, not a rational preference for a comfortable income and an easy ride.
The chapter also repeatedly conflates two distinct benefits. Personal Independent Payment (PIP) is not an out-of-work benefit; it exists to help meet the additional costs of disability regardless of employment status. Treating it primarily as a work incentive to be restructured misrepresents its purpose and risks undermining a vital means of support for disabled people.
The rising 'stickiness' of disability benefits
The report includes striking analysis on the increased ‘stickiness’ of disability benefits – the finding that young people are now remaining in the system for longer with worse outcomes.
Among 16 to 24-year-olds first claiming a health or disability benefit in 2010, 46% were out of work or education five years later; for those who first claimed in 2019, that figure has risen to 62%. Today, around seven in ten young people claiming a health and disability benefit are still claiming a decade later.
It should not, in itself, be surprising that disabled young people with often lifelong conditions rely on social security for extended periods, especially given the structural labour market barriers the report itself outlines. Nor is it surprising that those receiving both PIP and the UC health element have the worst participation outcomes: these are, by definition, young people with the most complex needs.
Something has clearly changed, and the trend demands serious engagement. But the welfare chapter stops short of properly interrogating what. Rising mental ill-health, hollowed-out local labour markets and fewer opportunities are all factors the report acknowledges elsewhere but are largely absent from its welfare analysis. ‘Stickiness’ and ‘perverse incentives’ end up floating free of the report’s own wider diagnosis.
This creates a real tension. In Chapter 2, young people’s voices are handled with care, the weight they carry and the systemic failures they’ve experienced come through clearly. By Chapter 6, those same people have become economic actors whose “participation requirements” need adjusting.
Outcomes that are understandable as the product of structural disadvantage and complex need get reframed as the product of perverse incentive design. Both can be true at once, but the welfare chapter barely tries to hold them together.
In an interview on the Today programme, Alan Milburn was clear that reducing the benefits bill should come from getting young people into work, not from arbitrary cuts. That is the right framing and suggests that lessons have been learned from last year’s welfare debate.
But the report also lays groundwork for extending conditionality to disabled young people. Strikingly, there is almost no discussion of sanctions and the risks attached to expanding conditionality.
Conditionality is not a neutral policy lever. Extending work-related requirements without fundamentally improving the quality and availability of support risks replicating existing problems at greater scale and causing real harm.
International comparisons often cited in this debate, such as the Netherlands or Denmark, do involve stronger expectations of engagement for young people. But these sit within a fundamentally different system where conditionality is embedded within a much more developed infrastructure of support and opportunity.
This is not an argument for defending the status quo or resisting reform. The report is right to identify that the current system is not working. Too many disabled young people are left without support and disconnected from meaningful participation opportunities. However, the overriding emphasis on employment as the primary form of meaningful participation is a concern.
Work matters, of course. But there are many ways in which young people with complex barriers can be supported to participate meaningfully: through education, training, volunteering, supported internships, and opportunities to build confidence, communication and independence (so-called ‘soft skills’) and yes, paid work where that is possible.
Resolution Foundation analysis shows that other European countries outperform the UK on NEET rates not because of higher youth employment, but because they keep more young people engaged in education, especially through strong vocational routes.
It is possible to design progressive welfare reforms that support good health, expand access to opportunities and, over time, reduce spending. But this will be the product of sustained investment and difficult whole-system reform.
The greatest risk is a familiar one. The Review calls for fundamental redesign, but the Treasury is tempted toward the path of least resistance: tightening conditionality and rebalancing existing spending without committing to the deeper changes needed. That would be self-defeating.
This government has shown it can commit to long-term system thinking when it chooses to, the recent SEND reform proposals being one example. The question is not whether reform is needed, but whether there is the political will to do it with the care, attention and upfront investment that is required.
