Is it too late for Britain's 'lost generation'?
Coffee House Shots
The Spectator
4.4 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2026
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
More than 600,000 16 to 24-year-olds are neither in work nor looking for a job. Youth worklessness is now costing Britain £125 billion a year – almost double the country’s entire defence budget.
Those are the findings of Alan Milburn’s new review into youth worklessness, who warns that the UK is facing an ‘urgent national crisis’. But is it already too late?
Noa Hoffman is joined by James Heale and Michael Simmons to discuss.
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Transcript
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| 0:28.9 | Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Daily Politics Podcast from The Spectator. |
| 0:34.1 | I'm Noah Hoffman, and today I am delighted to be joined by Michael Simmons, economics editor and |
| 0:40.1 | James Hill, deputy political editor. Now, today has been all about needs. Young people who are |
| 0:47.9 | between 16 and 24 years of age and are not currently in employment or in any sort of education or training. Today, |
| 0:57.6 | Alan Milburn revealed a long worked upon review into the Needs crisis and the launch of this |
| 1:06.0 | review took place in Islington. Michael was there and so was Pat McFadden, DWP Secretary. |
| 1:13.5 | Michael, can you take us through what's in the report, what Alan had to say at this launch |
| 1:19.9 | and what you make of the stats within it? Sure. As you say, Pat McFadden was introducing |
| 1:25.7 | Alan Milburn who's been doing this review into the Needs crisis. |
| 1:31.0 | And that's because for the last few years, actually, this is not a recent government phenomenon. |
| 1:36.1 | This has been going on since really the pandemic. |
| 1:38.3 | The number of young people who are not doing anything with their lives is really increasing. |
| 1:48.2 | And this review is in two parts. So the part that Alan Milburn revealed today is his diagnosis and then later in the year he's going to get into his |
| 1:54.8 | proposed solutions. And for me, the most alarming part of the report is he forecast that within five years, |
| 2:02.0 | we're going to have 1.25 million people on NEETs. |
| 2:06.5 | And he said that even in an optimistic scenario, that would pass 1 million. |
| 2:12.5 | But Newsflash, that's already happened because also today, before the Milburn review was released, we had the latest |
| 2:19.9 | NEETs figures from the ONS and they find that it has gone over one million, which is just a |
| 2:26.3 | really staggering figure. And there's lots of alarming statistics in the report. I mean, |
... |
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