Emma Hughes, Partner and Head of HR Services at Browne Jacobson, will be a panellist at the Westminster Employment Forum keynote seminar, titled ‘Next steps for youth employment and improving pathways to work’ on 8 September. Here she gives her view on the NEET issue.
Q1: As the number of young people NEET continues to rise, how should HR respond?
We have allowed entry-level recruitment to become extraordinarily complex at precisely the moment we need it to be accessible. Multi-stage processes, automated screening, recorded video interviews – these tools were designed to manage risk and improve efficiency, and there are legitimate reasons for using them. But there is a real danger that the system has overcorrected.
84% of NEET young people surveyed by the Milburn Review said they wanted to work or do an apprenticeship. The barrier is not aspiration – it is access. The most consistent complaint from young applicants is not rejection, but silence. That alone should prompt every HR team to examine its own candidate communication practice.
The practical steps available immediately are not complicated. Audit your entry-level recruitment processes for unnecessary barriers. Remove the requirement for prior experience where it is not genuinely needed. Reduce reliance on automated screening for junior roles. Introduce a meaningful commitment to communicating with every applicant. None of these require government action or significant investment, they just require employer decision.
Q2: Does this crisis lie outside HR's consideration, or are there genuine challenges and opportunities in providing meaningful early careers?
It would be wrong to lay all of this at the door of employers. Increases in employer National Insurance contributions, the extension of the National Living Wage to younger age groups, and the costs of compliance and onboarding all weigh disproportionately on the economics of casual and entry-level hiring. As employment protections expand via the Employment Rights Act, compliance expectations increase and greater scrutiny is placed on employment practices like probationary periods, casual working arrangements and zero-hours contracts, employers inevitably become more risk-conscious about hiring decisions.
The CIPD has been direct about this: the government must recognise the link between the Employment Rights Act and employers' ability to invest in jobs for young people. That is not an argument against employment protection – it is an argument for policy coherence. You cannot simultaneously expand the cost and complexity of taking on a young, inexperienced worker and then express surprise when fewer employers are willing to do it.
Milburn himself, however, pushes back on those who use this as the primary explanation. This crisis is structural and long-term – 1.6 million first-rung jobs have disappeared from the economy over the past two decades. That is not something that can be attributed to the legislative programme of the last two years. Both things can be true: the structural problem is deep and pre-existing, and the current policy environment is not helping.
Q3: How does the NEET issue connect to early careers as organisations introduce AI to take over entry-level roles?
Administrative roles are down 56%, sales roles down 44%, customer service roles down 59% since 2022. If AI is removing the jobs that used to bring young people in, what replaces them?
Those figures should give every HR leader pause. The entry-level roles that historically absorbed young people into the workforce, e.g. basic administration, first-line customer contact, data processing, are precisely those most susceptible to automation. We are simultaneously lamenting the rise in young people who cannot find work and accelerating the removal of the roles that would have taken them on.
At a recent board meeting, an icebreaker discussion about people's first jobs revealed a strikingly consistent picture - shop work, hospitality, warehouse shifts, paper rounds. Those roles provided not only income, but an early introduction to responsibility, workplace culture and confidence. The sobering question that followed was what the next generation of leaders will say when asked the same question in twenty years' time. For many young people today, those accessible, flexible entry points simply may not exist in the same way.
The concern is that we are using young people to fill gaps in the current labour market, rather than building pathways into the economy of the future."
That does not make AI the villain, businesses have a legitimate interest in technology that improves efficiency. But GoodWork, which submitted formal evidence to the Milburn Review, made a point worth taking seriously: AI career support tools must never replace human intervention for young people who are NEET. They need more contact with the world, not less. The organisations automating entry-level functions have a particular responsibility to ask what they are creating in its place, and early careers strategies need to evolve alongside technology strategies, not lag behind them.
Q4: Are we looking at a workplace revolution, and will the future eventually work itself out?
Looking back to look forward to the future, the Milburn report identifies over 20 years of government youth employment schemes, e.g. New Deal, Future Jobs Fund, Kickstart, Traineeships – and describes them as a record of failure.
I think, an important passage in the Report in paragraphs 666 and 667 is that Britain has not ignored youth unemployment in the past. Miburn sets out that the twenty years of youth employment schemes is not a record of passivity and it is a record of sustained policy effort. However, despite it all, the structural NEET rate has barely fallen below 10% in twenty-five years. The test for the government's response must be whether it is fundamentally different to what has been tried before because constantly repeating the same non-impact initiatives is not going to help here.
The immediate response from the government to the Milburn Report is 300,000 work placements focused on hospitality, health and social care and construction. This is a welcome commitment, but it conspicuously omits the sectors identified in the government's own Modern Industrial Strategy: AI, life sciences, the green economy, creative industries. The concern is that we are using young people to fill gaps in the current labour market, arguably following past initiatives that have not made a strong enough impact, rather than building pathways into the economy of the future.
Learning from the past and designing initiatives that will tackle this structural NEET rate now and in the future is what is needed. The autumn recommendations will be the real test.
Q5: Is the NEET crisis a chance to find untested talent, or is it simply the natural result of AI and an out-of-touch education system?
There is genuine opportunity here. Many young people who lack formal experience, polished CVs or confidence in structured interview settings still possess the adaptability, resilience and aptitude that businesses say they are struggling to find. The employers building relationships with young people before they are job-ready, engaging at 14, 15 and 16, not waiting for an application, will be better placed in a labour market that is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate for young people and businesses alike. But that opportunity will not be realised by accident. It requires deliberate choices about how employers assess potential, how they design access, and who they regard as worth investing in.
