UK expands youth work schemes amid 'quiet crisis' in employment

Ministers are expanding youth work experience and training schemes, after Alan Milburn warned Britain is spending £25 keeping young people on benefits for every £1 spent helping them into work.

Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary will announce plans for 300,000 extra work experience placements over the next three years as Labour attempts to tackle what the minister described as a “quiet crisis” in youth employment.

Nearly 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds are not in education, employment or training (Neet), with McFadden warning that almost 60% have never had a job at all.

“It’s a quiet crisis, a ticking timebomb, which risks their future working lives,” he said, adding: “It’s hardest for young people without family connections. No job because they have no experience and no experience because they don’t have a job.”

McFadden told the Guardian that many traditional “first rung” jobs had disappeared as retail employment declined and the pandemic disrupted workplace experience for younger people. “Talent is spread evenly across the country, but opportunity is not,” he said.

New analysis for the DWP suggests young people taking part in this scheme are 13% more likely to be in work two years later than their counterparts who did not take part, while four in 10 people move into sustained employment within six months.

Around half the placements will come through sector-based work academy programmes known as Swaps, which are six-week training schemes with guaranteed job interviews at the end.

Nearly 100,000 Swaps took place in 2025-26, according to DWP figures, with 25,000 young people aged 16-24 – a record number – starting one this year. Ministers are targeting 115,000 placements next year.

McFadden’s remarks and the expansion of the scheme comes as Milburn warned that the country had become “neglectful” of a generation struggling to access work and training opportunities.

“This is really shameful,” Milburn told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme. “We as a society, and we in politics, have been neglectful of what is frankly a scandal.”

In a stark assessment of Britain’s welfare system, he said ministers were spending a lot more supporting young people out of work than helping them into employment.

“For every £25 that we spend keeping young people on benefits, we spend only £1 helping them get into work through employment support,” he said.

The government hopes the expansion of Swaps can help reverse the trend.

Construction accounted for almost 17,000 starts, making it the largest Swap sector, with employers including Manchester Airport Group, JD and Gatwick airport backing the expanded placements.

Milburn said Britain faced a generational crisis in which the “old contract in society” was being broken.

“The old contract in society was that each generation would do better than the last. So this is the first generation where that contract is being broken,” he said.

He also highlighted the sharp increase in young people reporting work-limiting health conditions, especially those linked to mental health and neurodiversity.

“It’s a real thing, it’s not a fake thing,” he said. “This is a generation living with more distress, more anxiety.”

But he said the state had become more comfortable managing young people outside the workforce than integrating them into it.

“The real question is, just because you’ve got a diagnosis or a condition, why should that lead you to being transported into a world of benefits rather than into the world of work.”