Milburn says migrants not to blame for Neets crisis but falling immigration creates ‘opportunity’ – UK politics live

Here are four charts from Alan Milburn’s report on Neets that illustrate why he says the crisis is getting worse.

1) How UK’s youth Neet rate is getting worse compared to other European countries

The report says:

The UK now sits above the average youth Neet rate for high-income countries, the EU and the OECD. In 2025 the EU average for 15 to 24-year-olds was 9%, compared with 12.8% for 16- to 24-year-olds in the UK at the end of 2025. The gap is no longer just with the strongest performers. In 2014, the UK was around the European average. By 2025, only Romania recorded a higher rate.

2) How Neet rates are going up by gender

In the past young women were more likely to be Neet than young men, but that has changed. The report says:

In 2012, the UK female Neet rate exceeded the male rate by 1.8 percentage points. By 2024 males were 2.9 points higher, at 14.3% compared with 11.4%. The improvement for women reflects, in significant part, the decline in teenage pregnancy, with the under-18 conception rate in England and Wales falling 66% between 2007 and 2022.

3) How disability rates are rising for Neets, and for all young people

The report says:

In 2024/25, nearly half of young people who are Neet in the UK, 45%, report having a disability – more than doubling from 21.1% in 2013/14. Disability prevalence among all 16- to 24-year-olds has also doubled, from 10% to 19.7% over the last ten years. Young people considered to have special educational needs or disabilities (Send) are around 80% more likely to be Neet than average.

4) Proportion of Neets with particular health conditions

Here is Peter Walker’s guide to what is in Alan Milburn’s report on Neets out today.

John Swinney should tax the wealthy in Scotland instead of axing public sector jobs, the Scottish Greens have said. Co-leader Gillian Mackay warned the government’s focus on “public sector reform” would likely mean slashing budgets and cutting jobs, the Press Association reports. PA says:

Speaking during the inaugural first minister’s questions since the election, Mackay urged the first minister to agree to a bigger rollout of a four-day work week for public workers.

She also called on the SNP leader to work with her party to reform council tax – something long promised but not delivered by the SNP.

Mackay said: “We know public sector reform is badly needed, but trade unions in particular are rightly concerned that reform is usually a euphemism for slashing budgets and cutting jobs.”

Mackay said more money had to be raised from the “super rich” in Scotland and urged the first minister to “explore all options for taxing wealth before cutting public sector jobs”.

She asked the FM to back calls from Tax Justice Scotland to replace council tax by 2031 “at the latest”.

The group, which brings together more than 50 organisations campaigning for tax reforms, also wants the Scottish government to make faster progress on introducing a new levy on private jets.

It made the demands in an open letter to the first minister, with campaigners arguing “bold steps towards tax justice” could help provide funds to reduce inequality, invest in public services and tackle climate change.

Swinney said he was open to reforming or even abolishing council tax in Scotland but the government had to have “reliable means” in place to fund public services.

On reform, the first minister said while he understood concerns from trade unions, Scotland had “to be open to new ways of delivering public services”, saying Holyrood had to be a “bold” parliament.

He said Ivan McKee, public service reform secretary, would look to improve public services while making the government’s finances more sustainable, suggesting services could be delivered better while costing less.

He added: “Of course, without a majority in this parliament, the government is going to have to work with others to come to common positions, and I look forward to taking those discussions forward with many colleagues across the political spectrum.”

Kemi Badenoch has criticised the British Museum for postponing a talk on Jewish culture because of potential protests, the Press Associaton reports.

The museum said it had postponed the event after being told a “significant proportion” of attendees were planning to disrupt it, PA says. The lecture on ancient Israel and Judah was due to take place this afternoon as part of Jewish Culture Month.

In a statement, the British Museum said:

In recent days, we were informed that a significant proportion of registered attendees were individuals intending to deliberately disrupt the event, preventing others from participating in good faith and undermining the purpose of the programme.

The British Museum fully recognises the importance of lawful protest and freedom of expression in a democratic society. Equally, we have a responsibility to ensure that events hosted within the Museum can proceed safely, securely and without intimidation for speakers, staff and visitors alike.

Following discussions with organisers and security partners, a joint decision was taken to postpone the event to a later date when it can take place in an environment that properly safeguards both the audience experience and the integrity of the programme itself.

In a post on social media, George Osborne, the former Tory chancellor who is now chair of the British Museum, urged people to read the statement before taking a view on the story.

But this morning Badenoch suggested that postponing the event was unacceptable. In a statment she said:

Jewish Culture Month is meant to promote awareness of and celebrate Jewish culture in the UK. This decision achieves precisely the opposite.

Jewish acts and actors are now being routinely cancelled from events across the UK. As with the marches and protests going past Synagogues and knocking on doors intimidating Jews, the end result is an erasure of Jews and Jewish culture from Britain’s public space.

The government says it wants to combat antisemitism, it needs to tell publicly funded institutions like the British Museum to do what’s necessary to put this event on. The Conservatives will always make sure that Britain feels a safe place for Jews.

UPDATE: Nadia Khomami has more on the museum’s decision here.

Here is Richard Partington’s story about the Milburn report.

Q: According to a thinktank report, 27 young non-EU migrants have been hired for every one Briton since 2020. Do you think employers should have to offer jobs to British young people first?

Milburn said he thought that would happen anyway because immigration levels are falling. (See 12.20pm.)

But he said employers would need more support from government to allow this to happen. He explained:

You bring in a migrant worker. They’re often experienced. They’re often a bit older. There’s a high work appetite.

A young person might well have a big work appetite, but they’ve had no work experience, never been exposed to the world of work, never had an opportunity to have that Saturday job, a bit of work experience.

And so this is going to mean that employers are going to have to work a bit harder in order to get the very best out of those young British workers. But that’s what they should be doing.

And the deal that we need to construct as a society is if employers are going to do that, how can the government help them and enable them to do that as well?

That’s the new deal. And it’s an important one in a world where levels of migration are seemingly on … a pretty clear downward trajectory.

Q: Do you think there should be a separate welfare system for young people?

Milburn said the benefits system has “different purposes for different cohorts in the population”.

He said the system had to be geared to the needs of young people. That issue should be considered, he said.

Q: Are you worried that the structure of Pip (the personal independence payments) keeps young people out of the labour market? Does the government need to review how it works.

Milburn said:

In a sense it’s unfair to blame Pip for not getting good participation outcomes because that’s not what it was set up to do. It was set up with an entirely different purpose in mind.

But, in the light of how much Pip costs are rising, it is right to review it, he said. He said Stephen Timms is doing that for the government.

Q: Spending on adult apprenticeships and adult education has fallen sharply since 2010. Is that part of the problem?

Yes, it is, Milburn said.

If you look at countries comparable to ours, take Holland as an example. Holland has a third of the Neet rate that we do in the UK.

Is that about Dutch kids being different from British kids? Not all.

Is that about their labour market being different? Maybe a bit.

What is it fundamentally about? It’s about some structural things.

First of all, it’s about the question that you ask, which is they make a priority of vocational education and investment in it. And when you look at the numbers, there’s a far higher proportion of Dutch kids, Dutch young people, in the equivalent of our FE colleges than there are here. So they’ve made a deliberate choice and it’s produced a pretty good outcome.

Secondly, they approach things in different structural way. So one of the very striking features of the Dutch system, for example, is it’s much more integrated. The services pull together. Ours is fractured. They’re integrated. They’re pulled together.

There’s one data set. Critically there’s one organisation responsible. We have no one responsible here because everyone is.

And the final part of the action that they seem to get right, that we get wrong, is that employers are much more engaged from the outset with the education system, so that kids are getting familiarity with employers, with the world of work, with work experience, with all of those things that we know that employers are crying out for.

I’m not saying you can do a lift and shift from the Dutch system because you can’t. There’s different traditions, different cultures, different structures. But, boy o boy, is there something to learn.

Milburn said he would like to see schools given better incentives to stop their pupils endinng up Neet. He said:

You get five good GCSEs, that’s great, you get a tick in the box, the school does well, it passes its Ofsted inspection.

What happens if 30% of those kids end up Neet? Is that a good result or is it a bad result? I would say that’s a bad result.

So we’ve got to change the incentive system, we’ve got to change the inspection system, we’ve got to change what it is that schools and colleges are accountable for.

That’s quite a big change. But honestly, it needs to happen.

Milburn said he has been talking to mayors a lot as part of his review. They would be a big part of the solution, he suggested.

The labour market in Middlesbrough is just a different labour market from Islington.

And the people who’ve got to decide about what is right in that labour market for matching supply with demand have got to be based in those local areas.

And a big part of this equation is further education and vocational education more generally.

Q: Is immigration part of the problem?

Milburn replied:

We found no evidence that there is a link between levels of migration and higher levels of Neets.

Milburn said it was true to say that immigration has been high over the past 10 to 15 years, and that migrants were working in sectors of the economy, like hospitality and retail, where traditionally young people worked.

He went on:

I’d like to sort of couched it in a slightly different way if I can, which is I think migration is now an opportunity to help solve the problem.

We’re on a downward trend, migration levels down, not up. I don’t know how long that’s going to last, but it seems to be pretty consistent. All the economists tell me that it will keep falling, and we could have a minus net level of migration figure before too long.

And frankly, to be honest, too many employers have been on Easy Street. They’ve been able to import labour from overseas rather than grow labour and skills at home.

I know they’ve all got a problem. Talk to any employer, talk to employers and hospitality at the bottom end of the labour market, talk to employers in technology at the top end of the labour market, and they will all complain about the same thing, which is a shortage of skilled labour.

So where they’re going to recruit from. There’s a pool of labour [young people – the Neets]

Is it straightforward, is it easy? No. Is the pastoral burden for an employer higher? Yes it is. And that means back to some of these questions about national insurance contributions.

And we’ve got to accept that the pastoral burden for employers will be higher and therefore the support that employers will need, particularly small and medium sized enterprises will be higher too.

Reverting to what he said earlier (see 11.48am), Milburn said this should not be a “blame game” issue.

It’s one of those issues that’s a blame game issue. We just blame immigration as the problem. It’s not really, it isn’t.

Q: Do you want to see more conditionality in the benefits system, with people losing welfare payments if they don’t take part in work or training?

Milburn said that he was not making policy recommendations today.

But he said the report explains how the system works, and he said that some of incentives in the welfare system were “perverse”.

He went on:

There’s a backlog of two million waiting for a reassessment of their work capability. That’s two million people who could be helped into being in a job.

We’re not doing face to face assessments in the way that we once were. That means you can’t have a meaningful conversation with a young person who might have autism, might be living in a rural area where there’s no public transport. You want to be able to have a meaningful conversation with these people.

Q: Do you think Labour has the appetite for welfare reform in the light of what happened last year when it tried to cut Pip (the personal independence payment – a disability benefit)?

Milburn replied:

I’ve always taken the view that you live and learn. And I like to think that people in government – and Pat [McFadden] is one of them – have lived and learned.

Look, if you frame welfare reform is all about cost out and taking money away from people, particularly those who are sick and disabled, you are going to get an appropriate response. And that is what has happened.

So what are we trying to do here? We’re trying to do something entirely different, which is to say what is going on for young people from early years all the way through to the welfare system. What is it that we need to do to enable them to do what they want to do, which is to be in work?

Miliburn said he was regularly asked if he thought the benefits bill should be lower. He went on:

The honest answer to that question is yes, it should.

But the sustainable way to reduce the benefits bill is not by plucking an arbitrary figure out of thin air and saying, we’re going to cut it.

The way to do it is to get more young people into work, because if they’re working, they’re earning. If they’re earning pay, paying taxes. If they pay in taxes, they’re less reliant on benefits.

Milburn said the problem with the system now was that it was set up in the wrong way.

The first instinct is to say to a young person, particularly with a health condition or a disabled person, you can’t work, rather than saying to them, what would it be that would enable you to work? How can we help and support you to do so?

So I think honestly, that is the right question.

Milburn said he thought cabinet ministers agreed.

My sense is that there is an appetite to go back into this [welfare reform], but to go back into it in the right way.