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If you look, it's everywhere you look.

Young people telling new sites about how they've applied for literally hundreds of jobs with no success.

While overall unemployment is running at just over 5%,

almost a million 16 to 24-year-olds, 12.8% are not in employment, education, or training. And that

includes recent graduates in that age bracket. They're known as NEETs. So what's going on with them? Is it the state of the

economy? A lack of skills or that fifth horseman of the apocalypse, AI? Step into the briefing room

and together we'll find out. First, to get a picture of the overall employment situation for young people,

I'm joined by Shaoeshoe, Senior Research Economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

Shaoie Shu, can you talk to us about how the overall labour market is doing?

And by the way, when you do it, can you just tell us what stats you're using? Because we made a programme not long ago, which said that the stats were a bit wonky. We've seen the labour market calling in the last couple of years. So straight after the pandemic, there was this real surge in labour market activity. The labour market was really tight. Lots of vacancies, lots of hiring. Since then, we've had this increase in geopolitical

uncertainty and also trade uncertainty. And as a result, employers have cut back and hiring, and we've

seen payroll numbers plateau as well. If you look at the number of payrolled employees as a share

of the population, that's down about one percentage point in the last three years, and it's slightly lower than the pre-pandemic level. Now, you'll see that I did a little share of the population, that's down about one percentage point in the last three years,

and it's slightly lower than the pre-pandemic level. Now, you'll see that I deliberately didn't

mention any statistics from the Labor Full Survey, which is probably the one you did the program

on a while ago. And that's because, in contrast, the payroll data, you see employment rates

in the Labor Poor Survey being essentially flat over the last few years.

So essentially, you've been examining a whole series of other statistics which give us a kind of clue.

And that's the overall picture. How are young people doing within that?

Young people seem to be faring worse than older adults. So if you look at payrolled employees as a share of the population for young people, that started to fall earlier and has fallen by more.

So it's down about four and a half percentage points from three years ago.

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