Youth Unemployment: Autumn Budget 2025

Part of Treasury – in the House of Commons at on 10 March 2026.

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Photo of Torsten Bell Torsten Bell The Parliamentary Secretary, HM Treasury, The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions

The hon. Member’s phrasing of his question was very telling about the challenges we all face in our labour market, because while we have seen more jobs created over the last year, there is a longer-term challenge with youth unemployment. If we look at the last Government, we never saw youth employment rates recover to the level seen under the previous Labour Government after the financial crisis, which was exactly the experience he mentioned.

It is important that we grapple with that long-term challenge, and there is the newer challenge with the huge increase in NEET rates in the last Parliament specifically. We absolutely need to focus on both of those, which is why we are focusing apprenticeship funding on young people in particular, why we are introducing the youth guarantee, and why we have the independent review led by Alan Milburn to focus on the root causes of these challenges.