In the ongoing debate about welfare reform, we are overlooking one of the greatest economic and social challenges of our time: the one million young people currently not in education, employment, or training (NEET).
If we are serious about growth, productivity, and national renewal, this is where government action must begin.
This is not a marginal issue. One in seven young people is now NEET, concentrated in the very communities that have been left behind for decades.
The cost to the economy is unsustainable—not just in welfare payments, but in lost productivity, unfulfilled potential, and the long-term damage caused by early unemployment.
If we want to tackle Britain’s economic challenges, we must start by giving these young people a future.
The evidence shows this problem can be solved. In 2016, my family company sponsored one of Britain’s worst-performing schools in a struggling town.
It had been failing for a decade and was only a third full. We introduced a fusion of academic learning with employability skills, ensuring students were prepared not just for exams but for the world beyond the school gates.
Within three years, the school’s intake had tripled. Today, it is oversubscribed, and last year, 98.5 per cent of 16-year-olds and 100 per cent of 18-year-olds secured jobs, apprenticeships, or further education places.
This success can be replicated nationwide. The Centre for Social Justice has modelled how a targeted tax rebate for businesses employing and training young people could halve the number of NEETs.
Their calculations suggest that over a five parliament, this approach could generate a net benefit of up to £23.1billion for the Treasury, with each £1 of tax relief generating £4.76 in economic return.
Around 75 per cent of these savings would come from reduced welfare spending, alongside broader benefits such as higher tax revenues and lower pressure on further education providers.
At a time when every pound of public spending is under scrutiny, this is an economic opportunity the government cannot afford to ignore.
If even a fraction of these young people were given the skills and support they need to enter the workforce, the
impact on national growth would be transformative. Instead of waiting for young people to fall into long-term welfare dependency, we should be equipping them with the skills to succeed from the outset.
The Nieper Employability Benchmarks offer one such model, embedding real-world skills into school curriculums so that young people leave education ready for work.
A government serious about growth should not see youth unemployment as a social burden but as an economic opportunity to be seized.
If we fail, we risk entrenching another generation of wasted potential, economic stagnation, and social decline.
But if we succeed—if we give young people the training, confidence, and pathways they need—we can unlock untapped talent, drive economic growth, and ensure the UK remains competitive on the world stage.
This is the real social mission of our time. The only question is whether the government is willing to take it on.
Christopher Nieper OBE is the managing director of the David Nieper family fashion business.
