Young people should have legal guarantee of jobs or training, Milburn says

Young people should have a legal guarantee of a job, training or employment support, Alan Milburn has said, days before the publication of his highly-anticipated review into youth unemployment.

The former Labour health secretary’s report will be published next week and it will recommend how to deal with the crisis of so-called Neets – 16 to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training, the number of which topped a million earlier this year for the first time in more than a decade.

Before its Tuesday release, Mr Milburn told the BBC that the government should face a legal duty, which he calls an “opportunity guarantee”, to ensure young people have access to a route into employment.

He said: “It should be a guarantee for a young person. Because at the moment the only guarantee they’ve got is a very simple thing. To get a benefit. What sort of life is that?”

According to Mr Milburn, the proposal might work similarly to the way that local councils have a legal responsibility to offer accommodation or advice to the homeless, or accommodate children in care.

He said previous employment schemes have been temporary, and do not go far enough to tackle the problem of young people not in education, employment or training.

The TUC welcomed the proposal of a legal guarantee as a “game-changer” but argued that new support for young people should not come at the expense of wider public services.

General secretary Paul Nowak said: “The TUC has long been calling for the government to put the turbo-boosters on its jobs guarantee scheme by expanding it and making it permanent so we can all reap the long-term rewards of getting more young people into work.”

Mr Milburn said that those who do not take up the initiatives could lose their benefits, telling the BBC having young people on benefits is 25 times more costly than what the spending would be on employment support.

He suggested that ratio should be cut down to two to one, which would mean significant cuts to benefit spending and a substantial injection of funds into training, education or other forms of support.

His comments come after Andy Burnham described Mr Milburn’s forthcoming report as a “watershed moment”, but stopped short of committing to implementing its recommendations in full.

Mr Milburn is expected to call for under-25s to no longer be able to claim the health element of universal credit (UC) or personal independence payments (Pip), moving them instead to a “youth allowance”, paid at the same level as the standard rate of universal credit.

Charities representing disabled people have expressed concern at how Mr Milburn’s proposals, which he has described as a “big rewriting of the welfare system”, might work.

Labour MP Clive Lewis criticised Mr Milburn for revealing some of his proposals before they can be scrutinised in full and said MPs are unable to answer questions from their constituents about how they might be affected.

“To generate this kind of fear and uncertainty through media interviews is deeply irresponsible,” he said in a post on X, adding that he had written to the House speaker to complain.

Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, who was part of the revolt which forced Sir Keir Starmer’s government to abandon proposals in summer 2025, expressed doubt as to whether she would be able to vote for the plans set out so far.

Asked whether he would accept the politically sensitive report in full, the prime minister declined to provide that “blanket assurance”.

He told reporters in Dublin on Friday: “We will have to wait until the report is published. It’s a wide-ranging report, and obviously we’ll set out our response next week.

Mr Burnham said: “It’s starting to point to a very different way of thinking about welfare and support, and moving more towards guaranteeing support for young people to move forward and get into work, rather than leaving them in a situation where they don’t get the support when they need it and then end up on benefits in their 20s. Nobody wants that.

“So there are big implications, but I think we’ll have to wait for the report.

Speaking at Welsh Labour conference on Saturday, he echoed Mr Milburn’s warnings of a growing “youth detachment” phenomenon post-pandemic with “too many young people feeling lost in their 20s and feeling there’s no alternative other than benefits”.

He pointed to work being done by No 10 North on the possibility of “full devolution” of employment support, adding: “We can do better for them.

“We are going to bring forward a vision around rethinking childhood and reimagining youth in terms of the support that we give them, it can’t be right that we’ve stripped support away from young people as a society, as life was getting harder for them, and growing up was getting more difficult.”