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Mayors across England should be given greater powers to tackle the youth unemployment crisis and avoid the “long-term scarring” of regions outside London, the government’s work tsar has said.
Alan Milburn, who is leading a major review into increasing inactivity among Britain’s young people, said the issue could not be solved by Whitehall alone.
Most of the nearly 1 million young people not in work, education or training (Neets) are in the north and Midlands. Eight of the 10 local authorities with the highest number of Neets are in these two regions.
In an interview with the Guardian, Milburn said: “Local authorities and mayors have an absolutely critical role to play because they’ve got convening power – they can bring together schools, the colleges, the employers in an area.
“They’ve got some legal powers. I think we will look at whether those legal powers go far enough.”
The former health secretary added: “They have some powers over education but there’s a real question about whether they need to have more responsibilities for reducing Neet rates, more responsibilities in terms of skills and employment support – because if this is going to be addressed as a problem, it’s got to be addressed locally as well as nationally.”
The latest official figures from the Office for National Statistics showed unemployment increased to 5.2% in the final quarter of 2025, the highest rate since the start of 2021. Young people have been bearing the brunt of this rise, with 16% of those aged 16-24 unemployed, nearly an 11-year-high.
In the north-east, 17.3% of young people are not in work, education or training – far higher than the national average. In Yorkshire and Humberside, 16.8% of young people are Neets.
Milburn said he had been “horrified” to learn that 45% of all 24-year-old Neets have never had a job, saying this would have a “long-term scarring effect” on their lives.
The social mobility expert has promised that there would be no “no go” areas for his inquiry, which is due to publish an interim update in May before its full recommendations in September. It will examine the role of the welfare state and NHS in youth unemployment.
He said his review team was in “very active conversations” with mayors and local authorities to about “how we can make sure that they are very active participants in solving this problem”.
A panel of health, business and policy experts, including the former John Lewis boss Charlie Mayfield, ex-Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane and social welfare expert Dame Louise Casey, will help draw up recommendations.
Speaking on a visit to an adult employment centre in Bradford, Milburn said he was attempting to “ignite a movement for change” beyond Westminster on youth unemployment.
Asked whether he was concerned that the economic shocks from the Middle East conflict would derail the government’s domestic agenda, including tackling the young unemployment crisis, Milburn said this issue was the most “visceral” he had examined in three decades in public life.
“It taps into a deep sense of concern and indeed fear amongst the British public, and the job of the politicians is to dispel that fear and to frankly provide some hope for the future,” he said.
“I’ve never known anything quite like it in 30 years or whatever it is that I’ve been around politics and public policy. This has got more salience with the public than any issue I’ve ever dealt with.
“Although this is about a cohort of million young people, what the public are worried about is the generational challenge of this generation of young people being worse off than their parents or their grandparents – and that’s the first time in a hundred years that that has been the case.
“There’s a fear in British society that the contract that we’ve had – that each generation would do better than the last – has been broken.”
