Ian Sollom calls on the government to invest in and support local practical, workable solutions to help young people into training and work.

Originally written for the Cambridge Independent Column – June 2026

On Market Square in St Neots, there is a place called the Citizen Hub. You can walk in off the street - no appointment, no forms, no cold waiting room - and find help with your CV, a course that fits around your life, or simply someone to talk to about what comes next. Cambridge Regional College runs skills sessions there each week. Earlier this year, it won the national Association of Colleges Beacon Award for Excellence in Careers and Enterprise.

It is practical and it works. And it is also exactly the kind of thing that Alan Milburn's review into young people and work - published last month - suggests we need more of.

Almost one million young people in Britain are currently not in education, employment or training (NEET). That figure has been rising for years, and the Milburn review is the most serious attempt in a generation to understand why. Its conclusions are striking - and, in some respects, uncomfortable for a government that has been talking about growth since the day it took office.

The report's sharpest finding is fiscal. For every £1 the government spends helping young people into work, £25 goes on the long-term consequences of failure: benefits, health costs, lost tax revenue. The lifetime earnings loss for a young person who spends a year NEET is estimated at £52,000. PIP payments to 16–24-year-olds have more than doubled in five years and are projected to reach £6.5 billion by 2030. The cumulative cost of almost one million NEET young people is estimated at £125 billion a year - more than we spend on education. This is not a welfare story. It is a story about a failure of economic strategy.

The Milburn review is unusually direct in highlighting the demand side of the problem alongside the supply. The labour market itself has weakened. Entry-level roles have narrowed. You cannot simply train your way out of that demand-side problem.

Addressing demand-side failures requires both action and infrastructure. On the demand side, that means working with employers to genuinely co-invest in the transition from education to work. It means creating local structures that give businesses a genuine stake in the pipeline of local talent. Groups of smaller employers pooling training resources, working alongside local authorities and colleges to shape what gets taught and who gets hired. And it means recognising that a government loading significant new costs onto businesses - through National Insurance increases and poorly targeted employment regulation - while simultaneously expecting them to take more chances on young people is working against itself.

None of that is possible, however, if the colleges and community organisations that support young people through the transition are running on empty. Cambridge Regional College accepted 400 students beyond its funded allocation this year, because demand is growing and the college is well-run enough to absorb the cost. But it cannot keep doing so indefinitely without confirmation that those places will be funded. The government's increase in 16-19 funding for the coming year is 0.55% - well below inflation, and a breach of its own commitment to real-terms increases. Public sector pay awards are running at three to three-and-a-half per cent. The gap between what colleges receive and what it costs to employ good teachers is widening every year.

This is not caution with public money. It is the expensive choice. A college that cannot recruit and retain staff, that has to think twice before taking on another cohort of young people who want to learn a trade, is producing the conditions that make the Milburn numbers worse.

The report is so far interim, a diagnostic. Alan Milburn will be making policy recommendations when the full report is published later this year. But what the report already points to - and what has been missing - is not more employment programmes, but better structures. Serious, sustained investment in further education. A skills system with genuine independence and real authority across government. Employer co-investment with meaningful local accountability. And local mechanisms that connect the labour market to the people in it, rather than leaving that work to the goodwill of individual colleges and community organisations.

Sam Squire, the CEO of Inspire 2 Ignite - a St Neots community interest company that works with young people at risk of becoming NEET - recently gave a TEDx talk in which he reframed that million-strong statistic. Not a crisis to be managed, but unrealised potential. His call was for a united movement to nurture, equip, empower, and help every young person thrive - a new definition of NEET.

It is a better way of thinking about what the Milburn review is really asking of us. The Citizen Hub is already doing it. The question is whether the government will build the funding and structures to make that kind of work sustainable - before the cost of not doing so gets any larger.