Young British men are NEET (not in employment, education or training) more than women

For decades, far more women than men were classed as NEET (not in education, employment or training). Thanks to government efforts to bring more women into the workforce after the financial crisis, the gap had closed by the time the pandemic hit in 2020. The question now for Prime Minister Keir Starmer is how to tackle rising male unemployment.

Inactivity not only ruins life chances, it comes at a cost to the economy in terms of lost potential output and tax revenue. At stake is Starmer’s ambitious goal of achieving the fastest sustained growth among advanced industrial economies.

Meanwhile, new light has been shed on the particular problem of male inactivity in the wake of the anti-immigration riots that swept the UK just weeks after the July 4 general election.

The challenge facing the new government was laid bare in last month’s official figures. These showed that nearly 460,000 men aged 18 to 24 were NEET on average in the first half of the year, a rate of more than 16%. The rate for women was 13%.

Worryingly, almost 60% of men who are neither studying nor working are inactive, i.e. not looking for work. That figure has increased by around 45% since 2019. In contrast, the number of women has barely changed. Activists say that the health crisis that has affected the labour market as a whole in recent years is having a major impact.

“We see that mental health issues are increasing and affecting young men a lot,” said Laura-Jane Rawlings, founder and chief executive of Youth Employment UK, which provides careers support for young people. “During education, young men tend to be more confident about their next steps and their abilities, but with the reality of trying to find a job, that confidence seems to disappear from young people quite quickly.”

“Younger women tend to feel a little bit more of the financial burden, so they will take that job, accept that lower salary and probably stick it out a little bit longer.”

While women have made progress in the workplace thanks to corporate targets for gender balance and flexible working, many young men have been left behind as globalisation has uprooted jobs and values ​​from male-dominated industrial centres. The rise of far-right parties in the developed world has been attributed to economic grievances: men are twice as likely as their female peers to support the anti-immigration Reform UK party, according to a YouGov analysis of election results.

Overall unemployment in Britain is low, just above 4%. However, the jobless rate among 16- to 24-year-olds rose to 14.2% in the three months to July, the highest since 2015 outside the pandemic, and one in six has been out of work for more than 12 months. Youth unemployment in Britain is higher than the OECD average, at around 11%, and economists expect it to rise further.

“Young people find themselves out of work and then they stay out of work for longer,” said Barry Fletcher, executive director of the Youth Futures Foundation. “It’s a huge policy problem when that period starts to extend beyond six or 12 months, because that has a long-term detriment to their economic output and obviously has a broader impact on GDP.”

Boys perform worse than girls at school, and many find their options limited by their poor qualifications, excluding them from some alternative routes into employment, such as apprenticeships. The end of a government-backed traineeship scheme in summer 2023 has made matters worse.

“We end up with a squeeze on the labour market, where graduates are taking the less-skilled jobs because there are no jobs for graduates, and they are reducing the market for young people who are less qualified,” Rawlings said. “You have a graduate working in a coffee shop, when in fact for low-skilled young people that would be their natural job.”

Now Starmer and his government have the responsibility to find a solution, and there are good economic reasons to make it a priority. If the NEET rate in every U.K. region were reduced to match that of the South West (the best-performing region), the country could gain £23 billion ($30.2 billion), or about 1% of GDP, according to PwC.

Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall has guaranteed training, apprenticeships or support to find work for all 18- to 21-year-olds. The government also wants to create a national employment service to help connect people with jobs locally.

Out of school and excluded from employment, young men are more likely to wait for the perfect job opportunity to arise, even if it means they become economically inactive, while “girls can take anything,” according to Rawlings.

Part of the reason is that men can afford it, because many still live at home. A third of men aged 20 to 34 lived with their parents, compared with just one in five women in that age group in 2023, official data show.

Inactivity has hit the UK harder than other Group of Seven countries, where participation rates have returned to above pre-pandemic levels. The main culprit is long-term illness, which now accounts for almost a third of Britain’s 9.3 million inactive people of working age. Long-term illness rates among young women have fallen slightly in recent months, but rates among men have continued to rise.

According to a PwC survey earlier this year, young people are more likely to suffer from mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression. And an independent report by the Youth Futures Foundation found that 44% of young people not in education or training say their poor mental health is preventing them from finding work.

“We can’t just treat this as a labour market issue, we need to address the underlying health issue as well,” said Louise Murphy, senior economist at the Resolution Foundation.

“It seems that there is a group of young people who are very far from the labour market. They have never worked, they do not feel capable of working, they do not feel safe enough to work.”