Why investing in industry helps solve Britain’s NEET crisis

A million young people in Britain are now not in education, employment or training, the highest level in over a decade. Alan Milburn’s interim review into young people and work has laid out the scale of it. This episode argues that underneath the headline numbers is a story about what happened to British industry, and that rebuilding it is part of the answer.The review’s findings are stark: more than a million 16 to 24-year-olds are NEET, six in ten have never had a job at all, and the cost runs to around £125 billion a year. As Britain’s industrial base declined, it took the way into work with it, the apprenticeships and vocational routes that asked for a start rather than a degree. You cannot fix worklessness without work, and for too many young people the first rung simply isn’t there any more.Part of why this is so hard to act on is how, over decades, we have come to measure the worth of public investment, counting the costs that land now more confidently than the returns that build slowly: industrial capability, supply chains, and jobs in the places that have waited longest for them. The episode makes the case for a broader idea of value, and sets out four things we need to do to act on it: count value differently, use what the state already buys, rebuild the routes into work, and let our institutions take long-term risk.If you find this podcast useful, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts