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Thomas doesn’t leave the house much. Apart from walking his dog, the only other excursion the 24-year-old regularly makes is a “humiliating” weekly trip to Iceland, where he stocks up on seven £1 frozen meals, usually an assortment of bland curries with the occasional garishly sweet, takeaway-style Chinese meal. “You’re going in and buying seven and the cashier is 100% thinking: oh, that’s one a day,” he says.

Half the time, he doesn’t bother eating them. “You just sit there and go: I don’t want it again. I’ve had it for two days on the trot.”

Like all of the young people interviewed for this piece, Thomas has been unemployed for more than a year. He is one of 82,000 16- to 24-year-olds in England in the same grim predicament.

Thomas, who lives in Warrington, gets £311 a month in universal credit. After his bills are paid and his dog’s food is accounted for, he has about £25 for the month. He is hardly lazy, having worked since he was 16. But this changed in October 2024 when he lost his job as a pub manager. Despite applying for about 2,000 jobs since, he’s had no luck.

At first, he was optimistic about securing more work. “I was applying left and right. I didn’t think I’d have any problems,” he says. But, apart from the occasional “copy-and-paste” rejection email, all he’s heard back is silence. Thomas is a pseudonym: he asked us not to use his real name in case it further reduced his chances of landing a job.

It’s not just his diet on which he’s had to compromise: his social life has come to a halt, too. When he is invited out for a few drinks or an activity such as paintball, he can’t go. “I say: ‘I can’t afford this extra 30 quid. I just can’t.’” Sometimes he lies, saying he needs to stay at home with his dog.

After more than a year and a half of unemployment, the misery is taking a toll. “I’d just like a normal life, mate,” he says. “To be able to go and meet people and do stuff and to not have to come up with lies. To actually eat normal food, maybe get a nice cordial and the nice toilet roll. It’s all very minor stuff.”

Sadly, Thomas’s experience is the new normal for many young people across the UK. After a trickle of headlines warning what a hellish time this is to be looking for a job, the crisis came into full focus last month with the release of the first part of Alan Milburn’s report on young people and work. It says that about 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds are not in employment, education or training (Neet), a figure that could rise to 1.25 million by the early 2030s without urgent government action.

Like many Neets, Thomas says Covid had a big impact on his situation. Before the pandemic, he had a part-time job while he was at school, working security at Bolton Wanderers’ stadium, although he had to keep quiet about his age, as he was under 18. When choosing his A-levels, he had gone for a reliable trio of history, geography and sociology and achieved good grades: ABB. But when the time to apply for university came around, the UK – along with much of the world – went into lockdown. He opted to stay at the college where he had done his A-levels to do a health and social care course. “I wasn’t going to spend nine grand to sit in a flat,” he says.

During this time, most of his friends moved away to university. So did his girlfriend. “We broke up. We were both just like: we can’t do this distance, it’s a six-hour drive,” he says. He feels he missed out on formative experiences because of this. “I never got that chance to go out with my friends because we weren’t allowed to leave the gaff.”

Even the seemingly little things from this period still hold him back today. He was learning to drive before the pandemic; when it hit, all his lessons were cancelled. “My driving instructor actually died of Covid,” he says. Now, he can’t afford to put down the £40 to £50 a lesson, but a lot of the jobs he goes for, even for bar work in Manchester, require a driving licence.

After realising that most of his friends had started new lives and formed new friendships at university, Thomas decided to move from his home town of Bolton in Greater Manchester to Warrington to work in a pub. It was here that he finally got the social interaction he had been missing. He joined the local pool and darts team, although he was the youngest by two decades, and learned the art of talking to bar staff. “I didn’t know how to go into a bar and order a drink until I worked behind one and watched how other people had done it,” he says.

There were some teething issues when fielding orders. “I didn’t really understand any of the shots. The first time someone asked for a Baby Guinness, I just poured some Guinness into a tiny glass,” he says. (He should have served a shot of Irish cream and coffee liqueur.)

Alongside his bar work, he did shifts in a pharmacy warehouse, refilling the machines that spat out medicines on to a conveyor belt when online orders came in. “I wanted something hands-on, but Jesus Christ – you couldn’t have music on, it was just you and the machines,” he says. He was taking home about £2,500 a month. “Young me didn’t really know what to do with money. I was going out because I never got the chance to do it at 18 – and I just blew it,” he says.

He did that for about a year and a half before moving on to an admin job, but it didn’t suit him. “It was boring the absolute life out of me. I’d finish my work at 2pm and end up sitting there twiddling my thumbs,” he says. After six months, he quit and took a job at a betting shop, but he barely lasted a month, calling it “the most depressing place on Earth”. He remembers watching “some dad put £300 on a bet while his wife and kid were outside in the rain. I thought: I can’t do this – it’s eating me alive.”

He was offered another job as a live-in pub manager, but, after a year and a half, the pub was sold and Thomas was out of work, just after his 23rd birthday. He has been unemployed ever since. Now he lives in a house with his partner and his sister, who, despite getting a first in English literature, has also struggled. Aside from bar work, the only job she can get is freelance shifts proofreading AI prompts for an American company. “It’s first come, first served. To get a shift, she has to be up at 3am,” he says.

On an average day, Thomas gets up at about 10am, walks and feeds his dog and then “scrolls online through job stuff”, a routine that makes him feel like “life’s just running away from you”. He has applied for jobs the old-fashioned way, by handing his CV out in town, including in pubs and bars, but that hasn’t yielded any success. He’s also gone through mortifying online applications for retail jobs that involved ad-libbing about himself for five minutes to a camera recording his response.

Last month, he got suited up for a jobs fair at a football stadium, wanting to look the part for any prospective employers. But when he arrived, he was greeted by unstaffed stalls fitted with QR codes. “I’m there scanning these codes. I was like: this is a joke,” he says.

Despite the drudgery, he continues to apply for jobs, usually about 50 a fortnight. However, his universal credit job coach appears unimpressed. “She saw them all and went: ‘I think you just need to dig a bit deeper,’” he recalls. The comment left him “fuming”.

One of his friends has joined the army, something he would consider doing “if something big ever happened where I needed a lot of money”, although his family have advised him against it. As for what could be done for his generation, he says the government should “look after its young for once”. While he doesn’t “particularly agree with any political party”, he believes only two, the Green party and Reform UK, “seem to have an agenda for young people”.

Thomas’s frustration is understandable, says Howard Williamson, a professor of European youth policy at the University of South Wales: “I’m 72. What we’re saying to young people is: ‘You’ve got to work your bollocks off to pay for me and my triple-lock pension.’ ” Williamson has dedicated his academic life to Neets, publishing the earliest research on their plight in 1993, and was a member of the policy action team on young people set up by Tony Blair’s social exclusion unit.

He says young people face a “polycrisis of challenges and issues” that are distinctly of our times. In this “rapidly changing world”, they are “panic-stricken about the cost of living, conflict around the world and the impact of social media”, while AI threatens the existence of many jobs. Austerity has “kicked away” holistic youth projects, the first rungs on the ladder towards stability and employment for many young people, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, and instead propelled them straight into the jobcentre.

Williamson says there should be a New Deal for young people that would create a “dedicated and distinct youth jobs market” with abundant and varied opportunities. “You’ve got to kick them up the ass with your arm around their shoulder and push them into training programmes with a sufficient repertoire of choice,” he says. The element of choice is crucial. “If you’re railroading them into things they don’t want to do, they’ll disappear under the radar.” He admits, however, that this would require a “phenomenal” amount of money.

Williamson understands why many young people, especially those firing out hundreds of job applications with no success, feel so demoralised. “The kids who keep persisting are the ones who will suffer most with their mental health, because they just get kicked in the face every time. They start saying: ‘I’m not bothered.’ It’s a psychological defence mechanism.” He says the education system needs to equip young people to be “much more versatile and chameleon-like” to adapt to the unpredictability of the future.

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Regardless of how the world is changing, you might assume being an Oxbridge graduate would make you a dream hire. But for 24-year-old Hannah (who asked us not to use her surname), a languages degree from Oxford has helped little in her job search. She says her mother, who grew up in the city, recalls “recruiters hanging around the quads” to make contact with promising students. But things are different today.

Since graduating in the summer of 2024, she has been unemployed. “I hoped that things would be less difficult. To come from literally the best-ranked university on the planet for my subject into zero jobs is a bit of a fall,” she says.

Hannah, who was state-educated, “always worked hard at school” and got into Oxford as a bursary student. While her first year was marred by Covid, she became very social in her second year, hanging out with friends for movie nights and volunteering with local schools. She also did a year in mainland Europe to develop her language skills, where she was paid for the first time as an English teacher. Since then, however, she hasn’t received a wage packet. “Everything situational that could prevent me from getting paid work experience has happened,” she says.

Hannah moved back home to her village in the New Forest after graduating, initially envisioning it as a break from three years of “high-intensity hard work”, and began applying for jobs in earnest towards the end of 2024. An aspiring civil servant, she tried for public service jobs; when this led nowhere, she began “applying for absolutely anything I could do”.

She almost got one job, being whittled down to the final two for a role at a research institution in London. After a process that took a “good couple of months”, she was invited for an interview. “I put a lot of hope in it, because it really aligned with my skill set,” she says. But the job was given to someone with 15 years’ more experience. “I can’t compete with that,” she says.

She has regular meetings with her universal credit job coach. “It’s quite demoralising. I’ve been told to lower my expectations and aspirations and not to apply for my dream job. Instead, I should go for any job,” she says.

She has had no success with either approach. She recalls one job she was encouraged to apply for in a toy shop. “They wanted someone to spend the day climbing ladders to get toys off shelves,” she says. She was invited to a group task where applicants were presented with a bingo sheet full of ice-breaker questions such as: “Who’s been the furthest away on holiday?” After this, they were asked to build Lego models as a group. “We don’t need to get to know each other,” she says.

In her sleepy village, only Hannah and her brother, who is also out of work, are in their 20s. She volunteers with a local charity, holding events for families and elderly people. Most of her fellow volunteers are older. While they sympathise, Hannah says they don’t fully grasp the dire situation faced by many young people. “I’ve had a number of people say: ‘Can’t you just send a letter to the government and get a job that way?’”

She socialises with people online, but in-person interaction with her peers is hard to come by. She would love to be able to drive to the nearest city to meet new people, but she can’t afford to get her licence.

“I really anticipated that I would be at home for a short while after uni and then I’d get a job in London. That’s all I wanted, because it seems like that’s the city where people are,” she says. She feels stuck. “I went from being totally independent and living completely on my own. I was doing everything for myself and I loved that life. I thought I’d be continuing this independence and basically living life. Instead, I’m finding it hard to get a basic job, looking at roles where 1,000 other people click ‘Apply’.”

Hannah gets £316 a month from universal credit. Her mum, a teacher, helps out when she can. “Everyone I know feels pretty trapped by it all,” she says. While she continues to apply for jobs, she is daunted by the rise of AI. “It’s noticeable how technology is taking our jobs. Supermarkets are all self-service now. When I was in secondary school, I was told that, when I would be looking for jobs, there would be millions of new roles that we hadn’t even thought of yet,” she says. “Where are they?”

In April, the former prime minister Rishi Sunak, who is an adviser to Microsoft and the AI firm Anthropic, said that AI was leading to fewer jobs for young people, a warning that was also made in January by Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the International Monetary Fund, who said an AI “tsunami” was coming. A survey carried out by the job search site Adzuna last year found that the number of new entry-level jobs in the UK had dropped by almost a third since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022.

Paul Clapp admits he’s part of the problem. He’s the co-founder and director of Priority Pixels, a digital marketing agency based in south Devon. The company used to take on one or two apprentices a year, but began adopting AI 18 months ago. Since getting fully to grips with the technology, Clapp hasn’t hired any. “It’s not going anywhere. It’s going to change the world, whether you like it or not,” he says.

The company’s AI of choice is Anthropic’s Claude, which Clapp says has taken over “all the boring, laborious tasks” that an apprentice would have done. “They would have been bored, but that’s the point. When you come in, you’ve got to work your way up and you start with the boring stuff,” he says.

AI is not coming for the experts who already have jobs, he says. “It’s wonderful, but it’s not a replacement,” he says. But he acknowledges it may shut out the next generation.

It’s not as simple as trimming the fat to chase profits. With rises to employers’ national insurance contributions and the minimum wage, “the incentives for hiring apprentices have gradually got worse, to where it’s like: what is the point?” A report by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research found that the cost of hiring an entry-level worker has risen by about 7% in real terms since these changes were introduced in April 2025. While about half of the apprentices Clapp has hired have been “great” and “genuinely seeking an opportunity”, he says the other half have “not put in quite as much effort” as he would have liked. “It’s easily the biggest challenge we’ve had, finding people who are motivated. I don’t want to pay someone £25,000 a year when they’re not going to be of value.”

He is equally unimpressed by some of the job applications he’s received. “You’ve just applied for a load of jobs with the same CV and not even bothered reading what it is you’re applying for,” he says. “I definitely think that is part of the problem.” He doesn’t think the education system is setting up young people for the jobs on offer today, especially in his field. “We’ve got two colleges near us and neither of them have ever done a web development apprenticeship, which I just find staggering.”

Milburn’s sprawling report highlights dozens of issues that combine to make Neethood so common. Among them are transport and housing, which he calls the “barriers nobody counts” – particularly sparse, unreliable bus services in rural communities.

Leo Borowski, 24, lives in a large village just south of Crewe in Cheshire. He says the area is filled with takeaways, barbers and a crop of new warehouses. He has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and austism. “The market for jobs around here for these types of people is very hard,” he says. Getting around, especially to surrounding towns and cities with more opportunities, is a big challenge, with buses running irregularly. He was in the running for one job that started at 8am and finished at 9pm. “My last bus home is at 8pm,” he says.

Borowski, who receives universal credit and a personal independence payment, worked in a cafe part-time when he was 16 and has completed courses in sports and active leisure, music and baking at college. But aside from a stint in a restaurant as part of the government’s now-closed Kickstart scheme, he hasn’t been in full-time employment since leaving education in 2022.

He grew up in care and, after turning 18, was “swung left, right and centre” across Cheshire East by the council. “I didn’t know how to navigate the job market, so I kept going in and out of education until I wasn’t able to do any courses any more because of my age,” he says. While some companies appear to be accommodating to those with additional needs, Borowski says others aren’t and “brush it off as naughty behaviour”.

Growing up, he wanted to be a drummer in a band, but he didn’t pursue it because people were “always putting me down”. Now, he is getting rid of his drum kits to make space and raise some extra money. “I’m in debt with water, gas and electric,” he says. “It feels like it’s more common than it should be in my age group.” He has handed out his CV in person, to no avail. Borowski volunteers with the local YMCA and is taking a part-time maths and English course, which can be picked up and paused, with the hope of attending university to become a dog behaviourist. With the prospect of securing a full-time job ever elusive, he is hoping to start a dog-training and dog-sitting business.

In Peterborough, 20-year-old David Kinkaid is coming up to a year out of college, where he completed a BTec covering business, IT and media. Aside from two weeks’ work experience at a supermarket, he hasn’t had paid employment, despite looking for a job since he was 16. “I felt a bit upset because I was back to square one,” he says of the end of his placement. He is looking for an entry-level job in IT and applies for 40 to 50 roles a month, but rarely hears back. “It’s very depressing and soul-destroying,” he says.

His mother, Elle, recalls a “very different” time decades back when you could “walk into places with a CV and get jobs straight away”. Now, she says, this initiative gets you nowhere: “Everyone’s got to start from somewhere and young people aren’t being given the chance to start from anywhere.” David has friends who have graduated from university and applied for “100 to 200 jobs and haven’t got anything”, he says.

In his report, Milburn decries the “sometimes cruel” myths that surround the young, something Elle has seen among her peers. “To the ones that say: ‘In my day, at 25 years old, I had a four-bedroom house,’ I’d ask: ‘But how much did you buy it for?’ It’s not the same now,” she says. “He’s trying his best to get a job, but with the current climate there’s just nothing happening.” Elle isn’t in a rush to get David out of the house, but she wants him in the workplace for his own benefit. “Socialising is important for health and emotional wellbeing. Being in the workplace would help him become a bit more outgoing,” she says. David agrees: “I’d have a bit more independence in my life and take responsibility for myself.”

For some young people, being a Neet can push them to the very fringes of society. Last month, charities warned that the growing number of young people out of work or education were being driven into housing insecurity or homelessness. The Big Issue, a street magazine sold by people experiencing homelessness, said there had been a 60% increase in vendors aged 18 to 24 since 2022, up from 449 to 720.

In east London, among trendy upmarket bars and colourful boutiques flogging pricey knick-knacks, sits Sohaila. The Middle Eastern small-plates restaurant, in the heart of Shoreditch, provides work experience to Londoners living in temporary accommodation to get them on the employment and housing ladder. “If people don’t have employment, then the whole structure of someone’s life starts to unravel,” says Ryan McKiernan, the managing director of Fat Macy’s, the charity behind Sohaila. “You can’t afford day-to-day expenses or your accommodation. In the end, you can very easily end up in a state of homelessness.”

He says the charity, which helps people of all ages, has noticed an increase in young people seeking assistance. “I think that’s tied into the wider picture of Neets,” he says. After taking part in a six-week training programme run by professional chefs at Sohaila, participants are given tailored employability support. Once someone is successful in securing a job, the charity gives them a £1,500 grant for a housing deposit so they can sign a tenancy agreement.

McKiernan says the young people the charity works with “almost always have some experience of adverse childhood experiences”, including growing up in poverty. This chimes with the Milburn report, which says that more than half of 17-year-old Neets have “persistent exposure to poverty and family adversity”. When many turn 18 and are forced to become self-reliant, particularly without an income, they are vulnerable to falling into a “cycle of homelessness”. Summing up the importance of getting a job, McKiernan says: “Secure work leads directly to stable housing.”

But it’s easier said than done. Back in Warrington, Thomas is contemplating the gulf between his dreams and reality. “It’s just the most mind-numbing, surreal experience,” he says. “When you were young, you were told you would have a career and your own house, but you don’t. You’re just about struggling and able to pay for £1 meals. It’s insanely easy to get down in the dumps.”

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