Milburn calls for legal job or training guarantee for under-25s ahead of review

A legal guarantee for young people

Alan Milburn, a former Labour health secretary who is the government's youth unemployment tsar, wants young people to have a legal guarantee of a job, training or employment support. He calls it an 'opportunity guarantee', which would place a legal duty on government to make sure under-25s have a route into employment. Milburn points to the duties councils already hold to offer homeless people accommodation or advice, or to accommodate children in care, as a model. He argues earlier employment schemes have been temporary and that a permanent legal entitlement is needed. Under his plan, young people who refuse the help on offer could lose their benefits. He put the problem in blunt terms to the BBC:

“It should be a guarantee for a young person. Because at the moment the only guarantee they've got is a very simple thing.”

Moving money from benefits to work

Milburn says the amount spent on benefits for young people is 25 times the amount spent on employment support, and he wants that balance shifted to two to one. He framed the gap in cash terms:

“the pendulum's swung far too far from the one to the other - £25 to one, and we can take everything to £2 to one”

He accepts that the shift would mean significant cuts to benefit spending, and that a significant number of young people would lose benefits or face cuts. He has not yet put specific figures on those cuts. The other side of the ledger would be a large increase in taxpayer money for further education, training, health support and likely subsidised jobs. Milburn also wants under-25s to stop claiming the personal independence payment and the health element of Universal Credit. He says the government already spends £22bn a year supporting economically inactive young people, and that money needs to be spent differently.

The scale of the problem

The term Neet was coined in 1999 by Tony Blair's Downing Street, when the focus was on about 170,000 teenagers who were not in education, employment or training. After many attempts at a fix, a pandemic and years of a sluggish economy have pushed the figure to nearly a million under-25s in that situation, as of 14 November 2026. The problem costs the taxpayer billions, and its human cost has been described as a disaster, a national shame and even a moral crisis. Milburn spoke in Liverpool, where 14.5% of 16 to 24-year-olds in Merseyside are unemployed.

Timeline and government response

Milburn's interview is due to be broadcast on Sunday, 15 November, and the full review is published on Tuesday, 17 November, after a year in the making. The government is expected broadly to welcome the proposals, though how it reacts will test its appetite and capacity for radical change. Milburn wants it understood that Andy Burnham knows what the report contains. He told the BBC that ministers already know the direction of the review:

“All the way through, the prime minister, the chancellor, all the ministers, they know what's going on.”

He added that the launch will not be a surprise to them, which he argues gives the plan a fighting chance of being implemented.