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Neets review won't be for the faint-hearted - and will test Burnham's appetite for a welfare fight

Neets review won't be for the faint-hearted - and will test Burnham's appetite for a welfare fight

Milburn is not the first to try and fix the Neets problem - so what’s different this time round, asks Laura Kuenssberg.

It's an ugly acronym. And it's an even uglier situation.

The reality of so-called "Neets" in the UK - young people who haven't got jobs, aren't studying or being trained up - has seen hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of Brits in their late teens or early-20s struggle to find a decent future for well over a decade.

It costs the taxpayer billions. And the human cost is variously described as a disaster, a national shame, even a moral crisis.

When the phrase Neet was first coined by Tony Blair's Downing Street in 1999, the focus was on 170,000 or so teenagers who were not in education, employment or training. After many attempts at solving the problem, add in a pandemic and years of a sluggish economy, it's acute - with nearly a million under-25s in that situation.

A tome full of proposals to try and fix it once and for all will be published on Tuesday, after a year in the making.

How the government reacts will test its appetite and capacity for radical change, and the prime minister's real, not rhetorical, hunger for tricky political arguments.

The canny smooth talker behind the huge review, former Labour MP Alan Milburn, wants you to know that Andy Burnham knows exactly what's coming.

In brief

And it's an even uglier situation. How the government reacts will test its appetite and capacity for radical change, and the prime minister's real, not rhetorical, hunger for tricky political arguments. The canny smooth talker behind the huge review, former Labour MP Alan Milburn, wants you to know that Andy Burnham knows exactly what's coming.

This is the opening of the story, shared with credit to BBC News — Politics. The rest of the report — with every detail — continues on the publisher’s website.

Continue reading at BBC News — Politics ↗

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