Milburn review to urge state-backed flexi-jobs for disabled young people

The Milburn review of youth employment will land this month with a blunt prescription: the British state should create and subsidise paid work for thousands of disabled young people. Its answer is an “opportunity revolution” — flexi-jobs, employment subsidies and intensive skills support aimed at reversing years of labour market discrimination against disabled and chronically ill 16- to 24-year-olds. The review argues the state must underwrite jobs for youngsters shut out of both work and training, calling the current welfare and skills system outdated.

The numbers behind that urgency are stark. Roughly a million young people are classed as “Neet” — not in education, employment or training — and 45% of them are disabled or in ill health. Disabled young people are three times as likely to be Neet as their non-disabled peers. Review author Alan Milburn, a former Labour cabinet minister, has branded the surge a moral and economic crisis, warning that rising youth disengagement risks a “lost generation”.

At the centre of the plan is a Danish-style “flexi-job” scheme. It would guarantee disabled participants employment while letting them set hours that match their capacities — sometimes starting at just four hours a week — with the government topping up their wages. The review also pushes “job carving”, splitting a single entry-level role into its component parts so each becomes a separate opportunity; a retail job covering stock-filling, till work and locking up would turn into three openings.

Milburn has floated switching some of the £4bn a year Britain spends on disability benefits for young people into high-quality employment and training support. That idea is likely to draw fire from campaigners and potentially from Labour backbenchers, who argue job support should not be paid for by benefit cuts that push young people into poverty and further from the job market. The government has said it will not back “crude cuts” to benefits.

The proposals echo the postwar Remploy scheme, which built state-funded sheltered workplaces for disabled ex-service personnel and at its peak ran 90 factories across the UK; the last closed in 2013. The review will urge big employers to voluntarily adopt hiring targets for disabled 16- to 24-year-olds, though it is expected to stop short of statutory quotas. Alongside job creation, it calls for supported internships, placements, specialist job matching, coaching and help for employers making workplace adjustments.

Milburn has previously demanded a “turbo-charging” of specialist internships for young people with special educational needs leaving school and college. In an interim report this year he argued that abandoning a cohort of Covid-era youngsters coping with high levels of depression, anxiety, autism and ADHD would scar their life chances and lifetime earnings. Nearly half of 24-year-old Neets have never worked. The most common conditions reported by disabled Neets are depression, bad nerves or anxiety at 23.8%, autism at 22.7% and other health problems or disabilities at 18.5%.