This is The Guardian.

We are at risk of a lost generation.

Employers aren't taking people on as much as they used to,

and young people who lack experience,

because they're, by their

definition, at the start of their careers, are often the first to bear the brunt of that.

The life chances of people are really being eroded at the moment.

So this is more than an economic crisis. It's a moral one.

The government has been warned of a lost generation of young people with more than a million out of work or education.

From The Guardians Today in Focus, this is the latest with me, Lucy Hoff.

Richard Partington, our senior economics correspondent is here.

Richard, you've been covering this major long-awaited report from former Labor Minister Alan Milburn this

morning about the scale of the problem of the number of young people out of employment,

but also out of any form of education or training. How big is the scale of the problem?

It's really big and it's incredibly worrying what it says about the position that the country is in

and the prospects for the next

generation. So the report this morning from Alan Milburn, who was health secretary in Tony Blair's

new Labour cabinet, spells out a pretty stark issue. We have over a million young people,

age 16 to 24, who are not in education, employment or training. This horrible

word, neat is the acronym. But I mean, it's something that I don't think people like to use

as a term, but it encapsulates something really quite big and profound. And that's that the life

chances of people are really being eroded at the moment. There's a multitude of reasons why the more and more young people are out of work.

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