Poor health, weak vocational education and a hands-off benefit system have all left the UK with the third highest NEET rate in Europe

29th April 2026

Britain’s NEET crisis is being driven by a quartet of causes of rising ill-health, weak vocational education, a hands-off benefits system, and a weak labour market, and action on all four fronts is needed to get young people’s futures back on track, according to the Resolution Foundation on Tuesday 28 April 2026.

Lost in transition notes that the NEET rate for 18-24 year olds has risen from 13 per cent in 2019 to 15 per cent in 2025, leaving the UK with 900,000 NEETs and the third highest rate in Europe.

Young people in Britain are more than three times as likely to be NEET than a young person in the Netherlands.

Just over half of the recent rise in the NEET rate reflects a weaker UK jobs market. However, youth unemployment is not unusually elevated compared to previous downturns, suggesting that a lack of job availability due to recent tax changes and minimum wage rises is not the only driver of the UK’s NEET problems.

The remaining increase is explained by rising ill health. The share of 18-24-year-olds inactive for health reasons has risen by half since 2019 (from 2.8 per cent to 4.2 per cent today) and matches a broader rise in the share of young people reporting health conditions that limit day-to-day activities – primarily poor mental health.

Further interventions on youth mental health are key to any successful NEET strategy. But even if the UK reversed the recent rise in ill health, this would still leave most of the UK’s NEET problem unaddressed.

Wider action is therefore needed to get the UK’s NEET rate closer to comparator countries like Germany, Denmark (both 10 per cent), and the Netherlands (5 per cent).

The report identifies two structural drivers for the UK’s persistently high NEET rate: a dearth of vocational education, and a hands-off approach for the majority of those on incapacity benefits.

The gap between the UK NEET rate and that of other similar economies is driven by lower education rates, not lower employment. Of the 23 OECD countries with lower NEET rates than the UK, all but two close the gap entirely by having higher levels of education.

Young people in the UK are more likely to leave education earlier than their continental peers, mainly because of poor provision of vocational education. Just 22 per cent of young people in the UK are in vocational education vs 35 per cent in the low-NEET trio of the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany.

The UK benefits system is also distinct from other countries for having large numbers of young people without requirements or support to engage with work. The number of 18-24-year-old benefit recipients with no requirements to engage with DWP has increased from 160,000 to 300,000 since 2019.

This contrasts sharply with low-NEET countries where a no-engagement approach for young people is a last resort, and claimants are instead offered training, rehabilitation and subsidised employment.

Tackling these two longstanding problems would be transformative. If the UK matched the Dutch NEET rate, 600,000 more young people would be in work or education – improving their lifelong living standards and easing pressure on the public finances.

With the Milburn Review looking at ways to reduce Britain’s NEET rate, the report recommends starting with further investment in youth mental health, ring-fencing at least two-thirds of the apprenticeship levy for young people, and a new system of personalised engagement and support for every under-25 on Universal Credit.

Lindsay Judge, Research Director at the Resolution Foundation, said:

“The share of young people in Britain who are neither earning nor learning is rising, and now significantly higher than in our peer countries.

“While the post-pandemic increase is explained by a weaker labour market and rising ill-health, longstanding issues like weak vocational education, and a benefits system that both expects and provides too little to its claimants, are also playing a major role in Britain having the third highest NEET rate in Europe.

“Fixing Britain’s NEET crisis starts with investment in youth mental health support and vocational education, and a serious rethink of how young people interact with the benefit system. That is how countries like the Netherlands keep their NEET rate a third of ours.”

Key findings
The UK’s NEET rate has risen sharply since 2019, undoing one-third of the post-financial crisis progress. Among the 22 OECD-member EU countries, only three have seen larger increases since 2019 compared to the UK.

Just over half of the post-2019 rise in the rate reflects a weaker labour market. The rest is predominantly driven by a growing proportion of young people economically inactive due to ill health and disability, something that has happened alongside a rise in the proportion of all young people reporting poor health or disabilities.

A similar rise is seen in the number of young people receiving incapacity benefits: the Employment Support Allowance (ESA) and UC Health (UCH) combined caseload for young people has risen from 130,000 in 2019 to over 200,000 in 2025. However, the share of incapacity benefit claimants (of all ages) placed in the highest needs group (LCWRA), where they receive the highest rate of support with no work requirements, has risen sharply, from 40 per cent in 2017 to 81 per cent in 2025.

The UK’s high NEET rate compared to leading low-NEET rate countries is mainly a story about education and benefits support. Among the 23 OECD countries that had lower NEET rates than the UK in 2024, all but two do so through having more people in education, particularly in vocational pathways. Meanwhile, 94 per cent of young UCH recipients had no requirement to engage in work-readying activities, in contrast to low NEET rate countries where a ‘no engagement’ approach is typically last resort.

Most NEETs in the UK face multiple, overlapping barriers, meaning that single-issue fixes are unlikely to work. 84 per cent of 18-24-year-old NEETs experience at least one barrier such as low qualifications, disability or long-term disengagement, and over half face multiple challenges.

Recommendations
Improve young people’s health, particularly through better mental health provision in schools and colleges to reduce the numbers becoming NEET due to ill health in the first place.

Keep more young people in education for longer with improvements to vocational pathways, and by ring-fencing at least two-thirds of the Growth and Skills Levy funding for under-25s.

Reform work support and requirements for young people receiving benefits by tightening work requirements and providing single-system tailored support that is backed by a permanent programme (open to all young people, not just those claiming benefits) that addresses the multiple barriers NEETs face.

Read the full Resolution Foundation report HERE
The report can also be downloaded - Pdf 64 Pages