A new report on young people in the North East contains a statistic that should make us stop and think. Around 53,000 young people aged 16 to 24 in the region were not in employment, education or training in 2025. That is 18.3% of all young people in this age group, compared with 12.7% nationally, giving the North East the highest NEET rate in the country. More striking still, the rate is almost exactly where it was twenty years ago.
The report, 16–24 Going Under: Tackling the NEETs Crisis in the North East, has been produced by the Centre for Social Justice in partnership with Fenwick and draws on conversations with more than 120 charities, employers, colleges and frontline organisations across the region. It estimates that the North East’s excess NEET population costs the economy around £2.1 billion through lost economic output and tax revenues, alongside additional government spending. Its analysis rightly recognises that this is not simply an employment issue, because education, welfare, health and the labour market all play a part in shaping the opportunities available to young people.
There is much in the report that deserves attention, including its recommendations for a Future Workforce Credit to support employers taking on young people who have been NEET, stronger support through colleges and community organisations, better tracking of young people’s destinations and greater use of devolved powers and funding. Fenwick’s involvement is particularly interesting because this is not simply a business sponsoring a social policy report. A retailer that has been part of the economic and social life of the region for generations has a direct interest in whether young people can make that first step into work. It also underlines something employers across the North East understand: the question of young people’s employment is also a question about the future workforce, the future economy and the future of the places in which businesses operate.
But the statistic in the report raises a bigger question. If the North East has had a persistently higher NEET rate for two decades, despite successive governments, programmes, funding streams, reforms and interventions, why has it proved so difficult to change?
That is not an argument that previous work has achieved nothing. Many programmes will have changed individual lives, helped young people into work or education and provided support when it was needed, and the people delivering that work deserve recognition rather than criticism. But despite all of that effort, the North East still has the highest NEET rate in the country, and the rate is almost exactly where it was twenty years ago. That is what should make us pause. It suggests that the issue is not simply whether we need another intervention, but whether we have been looking at the problem in the right way.
There is an understandable tendency whenever NEET figures are published to focus on the young people themselves: what is stopping them from working, why are they not progressing through education, what support do they need and how can we get them back on track? These are all legitimate questions but taken on their own they can lead us towards an individual explanation rather than focusing on place.
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There is no single route that takes a young person from childhood into education, employment and adulthood, and there is certainly no single explanation for why some young people become NEET. Their circumstances, experiences and choices are different, often shaped by a combination of factors that can change over time. One young person may struggle with school attendance, another may leave education without the qualifications they need, while someone else may have caring responsibilities, face poor mental health, live in a household experiencing financial insecurity or simply find that the opportunities available to them do not match their aspirations. For some, several of these things will happen at once, while for others the circumstances will be entirely different.
That complexity makes the case for looking at place stronger rather than weaker. Rather than trying to find one explanation or one intervention, we need to understand how different circumstances come together in particular communities and what can be done to improve the opportunities available there. A young person does not experience government through the Department for Education, the Department for Work and Pensions, a local authority, a college, a health service or a Mayoral Strategic Authority. They experience their life through the opportunities and challenges around them. The institutions may be separate, but the young person is not.
The North East is not one single place, and the regional NEET figure can hide enormous differences between communities, the regional figure tells us that there is a problem, but it tells us much less about why it is concentrated in certain places, what is driving it there, and what needs to change if we are going to shift the trajectory.
The conditions facing a young person are not distributed evenly across the region. Access to good employment varies, as do transport, housing quality, household income, school attendance, educational attainment, health, access to services and the strength of local community organisations. The availability of employers, apprenticeships and part-time work can also be very different from one neighbourhood to another, meaning that the choices available to a young person are inevitably influenced by where they live.
The nature of the local economy matters too. The North East has remarkable areas of economic strength, particularly in manufacturing, advanced engineering, pharmaceuticals and emerging green industries, yet the sectors that traditionally provide large numbers of entry-level jobs for young people have faced their own pressures. The CSJ report highlights significant falls in employment in accommodation and food and in retail over recent years, precisely the kinds of sectors in which many young people traditionally obtain their first experience of work.
We can talk about making young people more employable, while at the same time asking what kind of employment opportunities are available to them, where those opportunities exist and whether they provide the kind of first step that can lead somewhere. That is why the NEET question cannot be separated from the economic development question. It is not enough to ask how we prepare young people for the economy; we also need to ask what kind of economy we are building for them to enter.
Over the past twenty years government has become increasingly sophisticated at designing programmes around individual problems, with initiatives aimed at raising educational attainment, reducing exclusions, improving attendance, supporting apprenticeships, helping people into work, addressing health barriers, strengthening careers advice and tackling youth unemployment. Some have been national, some regional and some intensely local. The CSJ report itself demonstrates how many organisations are already trying to address different parts of the problem, often with considerable commitment and expertise.
The difficulty is that the factors affecting a young person rarely arrive in neat policy categories. Poor attendance can be connected to family circumstances, family circumstances can be connected to poverty, poverty can affect health, health can affect educational participation, educational outcomes can affect access to employment, and the availability of employment can depend on transport and the local economy. A lack of opportunity can itself affect confidence and engagement, while a young person’s circumstances can change significantly over a relatively short period of time.
None of this means that there is a simple explanation, or that every young person experiences the same combination of factors. It means that the circumstances around young people matter, and that those circumstances are often specific to the places in which they live. The state has become good at designing interventions around individual parts of a problem without being equally good at changing the conditions in which those problems interact. That may help explain why individual programmes can make a real difference to people’s lives while the wider picture remains so difficult to change.
The answer is not to abandon targeted interventions, because there will always be circumstances requiring targeted support. It is to connect those interventions to a much clearer understanding of place, so we are asking whether the way different services, organisations and resources come together is actually changing the circumstances that shape outcomes in a particular community.
The timing of the CSJ report matters because the North East now has a different set of powers and responsibilities from those available to the region twenty years ago. The North East Mayoral Strategic Authority and Tees Valley Combined Authority now have significant responsibilities across areas including economic development, employment and skills, transport and investment, alongside new Integrated Settlements that provide greater flexibility over how public resources are used.
The region is already seeking to work across those boundaries, and I am not suggesting that local and regional leaders have somehow failed to recognise the need for a more joined-up approach. They have. The issue, it seems to me, is whether the new system gives them enough ability to act differently around the outcomes that matter, particularly when all the evidence suggests that conventional interventions have not shifted the regional picture sufficiently.
Devolution should not simply mean that more programmes are administered from the North East rather than Whitehall. It should create the opportunity to understand the North East differently, to see how the different factors affecting people and communities fit together and to use the powers available to change those conditions. That means starting with the place and asking what needs to be different there, rather than simply asking which existing programme should be applied.
Government will continue to set important policy, provide substantial resources and establish national standards, but where power has been devolved there should be greater freedom to use it around the needs of particular places rather than simply reproducing national programmes at a regional level.
The NEET challenge could therefore become a useful test of what devolution is for. If the North East can bring together economic development, education, skills, employment, transport, health, housing and community capacity around the circumstances of certain places, it should be possible to do something different from what has been done before.
The key is whether the powers that are available can be used to understand where problems are concentrated, what is contributing to them and which combination of changes could make the greatest difference. The CSJ report points towards this when it calls for greater use of colleges, charities and trusted community organisations and for the North East to become a pathfinder for reform.
For me, the opportunity is to go further by looking at the NEET figure not simply as a regional statistic, but as a pattern that may look very different from one community to another. In one place, school attendance and exclusion may be particularly important; in another, transport and access to employment may be a bigger constraint; somewhere else, health, housing or family circumstances may be more significant, while in many communities several factors will overlap. A genuinely place-based response would start from that reality, rather than by assuming that the same intervention will have the same effect everywhere.
That does not mean that place explains everything. Individuals have agency, circumstances differ and young people will make different choices even when they live in similar conditions. It means recognising that those choices are made within the opportunities available to them, and that government has much more influence over those opportunities than it sometimes acknowledges.
This is why the NEET challenge connects directly to the wider debate about devolution. Starting with place means recognising that the North East’s NEET rate is not simply a statistic about young people, but an outcome shaped by the circumstances of different communities. Moving power means giving those closest to those places enough discretion, resources and responsibility to do something different about those circumstances. The next question is whether they have the capability and financial architecture to sustain that change, which is where the wider argument about devolution leads us next.
For twenty years we have tried interventions designed to help individual young people navigate a difficult and changing set of circumstances, and we should continue to support those interventions where they work. But we should also learn from the fact that the regional pattern has remained so persistent. Perhaps the lesson is that we need to get better at changing the places in which opportunity is created, accessed and experienced.
The North East does not simply need another programme for young people. It needs to use the powers now available to understand why outcomes differ between places, bring the right levers together around those places and create the conditions in which more young people can see a credible future. If devolution cannot help us do that differently from before, we need to be honest about what devolution is for.
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