Milburn review: cut young people's benefits, guarantee them work

The review into Britain's "Neets" — young people not in education, employment or training — drops on Tuesday after a year of work by former Labour MP Alan Milburn, and it arrives with a hard-edged bargain. Milburn wants to stop under-25s claiming the main sickness and disability benefits, while pouring far more taxpayer cash into further education, training, health support and likely subsidised jobs. He is upfront that this means a significant number of young people losing benefits or facing cuts.

The money argument is the spine of it. Milburn says spending on young people's benefits currently runs at 25 times the amount spent on employment support, and he wants to flip that to a two-to-one ratio. He won't attach firm figures yet, but concedes the shift would be dramatic. The wider bill is already steep: Milburn puts the cost of the problem at £22bn a year.

To lock in the change, Milburn is asking for a new law creating an "opportunity guarantee" — a legal duty on authorities to provide a job, apprenticeship, training place or health treatment, modelled loosely on councils' obligations to children in care or homeless people. He told the BBC he won't fall into the "elephant's trap" of letting a teenager sue the prime minister over a job they fancied. The recommendations cover the whole UK, though how powers work in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will be settled in draft legislation.

The stakes are getting worse, not better. The term Neet was coined by Tony Blair's Downing Street in 1999, when the focus was about 170,000 teenagers; today nearly a million under-25s are in that position. In Merseyside, 14.5% of 16 to 24-year-olds are unemployed. New Liberal Democrat research out this weekend warns the number would hit 1.26 million by 2031 if nothing is done.

Milburn is candid about the timeline: up to a decade before the plan makes a real dent in the benefits bill, and billions in upfront spending along the way — though not the £6bn figure that has been circulating. He also says plainly that many young people are capable of working but don't, while insisting the vast majority do want to.

Opposition is already forming. The Conservatives said Milburn is right that benefits must be cut, but that "unlike Labour, our plan goes to the root of the problem", promising to halve employer National Insurance for young people and create 100,000 apprenticeships. Reform called the review "pointless unless we get action from Burnham straight away", warning it cannot be "another 10 years before the youth benefits bill comes down", and the Greens have labelled what they've seen "cruel". The trickier read for Downing Street is Labour's own benches, where Keir Starmer's earlier welfare retreat still stings — welfare secretary Pat McFadden has spent hours with MPs making the case, and a government source said this time "we've done the ground work". One left-wing source warned Burnham against repeating Starmer's "chaos", saying he "wants to be everyone's friend". The fault line to watch: whether cuts hit existing claimants, as Milburn believes, or only future ones.