Record Unemployment among Young Men in UK A Key Problem for PM Starmer

For decades, far more women than men were classified as Neet – not in education, employment or training. Thanks to government efforts to get more women into the workforce after the financial crisis, the gap had closed by the time the COVID-19 pandemic struck in 2020. The question now for Prime Minister Keir Starmer is how to tackle rising worklessness in the male population, Bloomberg reported.

Inactivity not only blights life chances, it represents a cost to the economy in lost potential output and tax revenue. At stake is Starmer’s ambitious target to deliver the fastest sustained growth among advanced industrial economies.

Meanwhile, a fresh light has been shone on the particular problem of male inactivity in the wake of anti-immigration riots that engulfed the UK just weeks after the July 4 General Election.

The challenge facing the new government was laid bare in official figures in August. They showed that almost 460,000 18-to-24 year old men were Neet on average in the first half of the year, a rate of more than 16 percent. The rate for women was 13 percent.

Worryingly, almost 60 percent of male Neets were inactive, meaning they were not looking for work. That number has risen around 45 percent since 2019. By contrast, the figure for women has barely changed. Campaigners say the mental health crisis that has hampered the labor market as a whole in recent years is having a big impact.

“We see the rise in mental health issues being felt quite a lot by young men,” said Laura-Jane Rawlings, founder and chief executive of Youth Employment UK, which provides career support to young people. “During education, young men tend to be more confident about their next steps and their skills, but with the reality of trying to find a job, that confidence seems to fall away from young boys quite quickly.

“Young women tend to feel the burden of the financial responsibility a little bit more, maybe, so they’ll take that job, they’ll take that low pay, and they’re likely to stick it out a little bit more.”

While women have made progress in the workplace, thanks to corporate gender-balance targets and flexible working, many young men have been left behind by globalization uprooting jobs and values in male-dominated industrial hubs. The rise of far-right parties in the developed world has been attributed to economic grievances, with men 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, at just over 4 percent. Yet, the jobless rate for 16 to 24 year olds increased to 14.2 percent in the three months through July – the most since 2015, outside the pandemic. That is above the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average of around 11 percent, and economists expect it to tick up even further.

With boys performing worse than girls at school, many are finding their options limited by poor qualifications, which effectively rule them out of some alternative routes to employment like apprenticeships. The ending of a government-backed trainee program in the summer of 2023 has made matters worse.

“We end up with a squeeze in the labor market, where your graduates take the lowest-skilled roles because there’s no graduate roles, and they’re squeezing the market for young people who have less qualifications,” Rawlings said. “You get a graduate who is working in a coffee shop, when actually for low-skilled young people, that would be their natural job.”

The onus is now on Starmer and his government to find a solution, and there are good economic reasons for making it a priority. By lowering the Neet rate in each UK region to match the South West – the best-performing region – the UK could gain £23 billion (S$39 billion), or about 1 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), according to PwC.

Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall has guaranteed training, an apprenticeship or support to find work for all 18 to 21 year olds. The government also wants to create a national careers service that would help connect people with jobs at a local level.

Barry Fletcher, CEO of the Youth Futures Foundation, said: “Young people are finding themselves out of work and then remain out of work for longer. It is a massive policy issue when that starts to go beyond six months or 12 months because that has a long-term detriment to their economic output and obviously has a wider GDP impact.”

Out of school and squeezed out of employment, young men are more likely to wait around for the perfect job opportunity to arise, even if that means they become economically inactive, while “girls might just take anything”, according to Rawlings.

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

Inactivity has hit the UK harder than other Group of Seven countries, where participation rates are back above pre-pandemic levels. The main culprit is long-term sickness, which now accounts for almost a third of Britain’s 9.3 million inactive people of working age. Young women have seen a slight decline in long-term sickness in recent months, yet male rates have kept shooting up.

Young people are more likely to suffer from mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression, according to a PwC survey conducted earlier in 2024. And 44 percent of young people who are Neet said poor mental health is preventing them from finding a job, a separate report by Youth Futures Foundation found.

Resolution Foundation senior economist Louise Murphy said: “We can’t just treat this as a labor market issue... we need to tackle that underlying health problem as well.

“There does seem to be this group of young people who are just very far from the labour market. They’ve never worked, they don’t feel able to work, they don’t feel confident to work.”