The Killer of Dreams
Nearly a million young people are NEET: Britain’s youth employment crisis did not fall from the sky. Successive governments helped create it by making education expensive, housing unreachable, secure work scarce and independence something many young people can no longer afford. Now Westminster offers work experience and calls it hope.
Blaming Algorithms Won’t Fix Britain’s Youth Unemployment Crisis
Nearly a million young people are locked out of work, education and training. This week the government offered two explanations: their phones, and a supermarket noticeboard. Neither touches the ledger.
On Thursday morning, Pat McFadden sat down on Sky’s Mornings with Ridge and Frost to talk about Meta. The company had just agreed to pay American states up to $17 billion over its role in the youth mental health crisis, and to impose night-time blackouts and daily limits on teenage users. Asked whether Britain would follow suit, the work and pensions secretary said yes, and then went further than he needed to.
“We’ve got to do something about this endless scrolling,” McFadden told the programme, before making the connection himself: his department deals daily with young people out of work, and he sees, in his words, a link between the two.
He is not wrong that the phone is doing damage. But watch what the explanation does. It takes a structural crisis, the largest generation of idle young people this country has produced in over a decade, and relocates the blame from the ledger to the pocket. Not the wage. Not the rent. The scroll.
This is the oldest trick in government, and Labour did not invent it. Blame the culture, spare the economy. But it will not survive contact with the numbers published on the very same morning McFadden was speaking.
Study hard, get a degree, build a life… the bargain is broken
The Office for National Statistics confirmed on Thursday that 981,000 young people aged 16 to 24 are not in education, employment or training, a NEET rate of 13 per cent. It is down 30,000 on the previous quarter. It is still 30,000 higher than a year ago, and the total broke through a million earlier this year for the first time in more than a decade. Chris Goulden of the Youth Futures Foundation called it “a large, long-term problem” behind which young people face real and complex barriers.
Algorithms did not do that. Governments did, over three decades, by dismantling the bargain that once made ambition rational. Study hard. Get a trade or a degree. Leave home. Build a life. Do a little better than your parents.
Britain Would Rather Blame the Algorithm Than Build a House
Higher education was turned from a public investment into personal debt. Housing followed the same road: rents that swallow wages, deposits that belong to another universe, ownership retreating over the horizon for anyone without family money behind them. Independence, for millions, has been reduced to a locked bedroom door in a parent’s house. Ask a young person what exactly they are meant to be striving for and the honest answer is a degree that costs tens of thousands, a job that barely covers rent, or a room in a shared house into their thirties. Call that economic inactivity if the label helps. It is disillusionment, earned the hard way.
None of this happened for lack of money. Britain has spent the last two decades on procurement failures, ballooning infrastructure schemes and consultancy contracts that would make a Whitehall mandarin blush. HS2 remains the standing monument to the state’s ability to spend enormous sums without delivering what was promised. The problem was never the size of the cheque. It was where the money went, and what it built instead of homes, apprenticeships and secure work.
Sainsbury’s 10,000 placements… but where are the jobs?
Into that vacuum this week stepped Sainsbury’s. The supermarket has agreed to provide around 10,000 work experience and skills opportunities over the coming year, split between KickStarter Explore for 14 to 18 year olds, combining school learning with hands-on placements, and KickStarter Insights for 16 to 24 year olds, focused on interview preparation and careers advice. The scheme begins in October and will target areas with high free school meal eligibility, where NEET numbers run highest.
Visiting a Sainsbury’s in Nine Elms to launch it, Andy Burnham said access to opportunity and work experience shouldn’t depend on who you know.
Read that back once you know what is coming…
There is nothing wrong with work experience done properly. A teenager learning to write a CV, sit an interview or understand a workplace gains something real. But these are not 10,000 jobs. They are workshops, store visits and employability sessions, and the distinction matters, because Britain’s shortage is not of young people who need lessons in CV writing. It is a shortage of believable routes into secure adulthood. There is a bitter irony sitting underneath the announcement too: supermarkets are among the most automated employers in the country, with self-checkouts replacing staffed tills and warehouses increasingly mechanised, so the placements introduce young people to entry-level retail work at precisely the moment that work is disappearing. Reuters reported this week that entry-level opportunities have fallen sharply over the past decade, with employers increasingly pointing to automation and AI as the cause.
A country that cannot offer its children the prospect of a better tomorrow should not be surprised when they stop believing in today
Anyone who remembers the Youth Training Scheme of the 1980s will recognise the vocabulary here: skills, opportunity, a foot on the ladder. For some it worked. For others it became low-paid labour dressed up as training. A placement can be worthwhile. It is not a substitute for a job, and a job means little if it never leads to a wage that can build an independent life.
£164,347 from Sainsbury and a Downing Street launch
There is a second story sitting inside this one, and it deserves care rather than either silence or exaggeration.
David Sainsbury, Lord Sainsbury of Turville, chaired J Sainsbury plc from 1992 until he left the company in 1997 to become a science minister under Tony Blair. He has not run the business in almost thirty years, and he does not own it now. Sainsbury’s is a public company with no controlling shareholder: the Qatar Investment Authority holds the largest disclosed stake, at around 15 per cent, and the rest is spread across pension funds, index trackers and smaller holders. Nobody, including any Sainsbury, can direct the company by vote.
That is the correction owed to the record. It does not end the story. Bloomberg still describes Sainsbury as a billionaire, and decades of giving away shares to his own charitable foundation have not stopped him being one of Labour’s most consistent individual paymasters, donating millions to the party, to the Remain campaign, and now to Andy Burnham personally. The prime minister’s newly published register of interests shows £164,347 from Sainsbury toward his leadership campaign, by far his largest single donation, within a total of £345,000 registered from a small handful of backers including Gary Lubner, Sacha Lord and the agency Charlie Parsons Creative.
None of that proves the KickStarter scheme was arranged as a favour. There is no evidence of that, and the Tribune will not pretend otherwise. But when the prime minister’s single biggest donor is a former chairman and long-standing shareholder of the company that just received a glowing Downing Street launch event, that is not gossip. That is a fact of legitimate public interest, and it sits uneasily next to a prime minister promising that opportunity shouldn’t depend on who you know.
Attlee did it with a bankrupt country. Why can’t we?
Here is what nobody in Downing Street wants to say out loud: Britain already possesses the policy that would make schemes like this unnecessary, and this publication has been arguing for it since 2024.
Council housing. Not “affordable” housing built by a private developer with a discount attached, but homes owned outright by the local authority, built by council-run construction yards employing and training the tradespeople who put them up. This is a case the Tribune has made before, and it has not gone away because a different prime minister now sits in Downing Street. Clement Attlee’s government managed 806,857 council houses between 1945 and 1951, in a country that had just spent six years bankrupting itself fighting a war.
“People in debt are slaves to their employers.” – Tony Benn
A generation locked into thirty year mortgages on overpriced homes, or permanently priced out of owning anything at all, understands exactly what he meant, a point this publication made at length when it warned Labour’s housing plans risked creating a new generation of mortgage-serfs rather than tenants with any security at all.
Burnham himself has already gestured toward half of this answer. In July his government announced technical education pathways from age fourteen, alongside changes to how Ofsted measures schools, so a workshop counts for as much as a university offer. As the Tribune argued at the time, the intention is sound, and after eighty years of parity of esteem being announced and never delivered, the policy deserves credit for trying. Council housing solves the other half. A local authority with its own construction yard has permanent, predictable, publicly controlled demand for exactly the trades a technical education pathway would teach, and can guarantee the apprenticeship at the end, which no white paper can.
But watch how easily the other half slips away the moment it reaches a Treasury settlement. Launching his campaign for the Makerfield by-election, the man who is now prime minister was unambiguous about the £39bn Affordable Homes Programme: “I’m saying council homes because control matters.” This week his own government announced the first £10bn tranche of that programme, and only 60 per cent of it will go to social rented homes. The remaining 40 per cent goes to shared ownership and other “affordable” categories, the same part-mortgage schemes this publication warned against as a debt trap in 2024, dressed up as a ladder onto the property market. Shelter warned the numbers fall short of the 90,000 homes a year needed to end homelessness even in full. The Tory opposition, not usually a source the Tribune reaches for, landed the more useful blow: shadow housing secretary Sir James Cleverly called the package “a sleight of hand”, noting the small print pushes delivery out to 2039, safely beyond this Parliament and this Spending Review.
Control mattered enough to say from a campaign platform. It mattered less by the time it reached the spreadsheet.
Follow the Money, Again: The Treasury profits from scarcity – and that’s the problem
So why has no government since built at that scale, not even one whose own prime minister once said the words out loud? Because the state, like the banks, has a direct financial stake in keeping house prices exactly where they are.
Stamp Duty Land Tax raised roughly £15.2 billion for the Treasury in 2025/26, most of it from residential transactions, up from £13.9 billion the year before. Inheritance tax brought in a further £8.5 billion, and HMRC’s own figures show residential property now accounts for close to half the value of the estates that pay it, meaning something in the region of £4 billion of that total is, in effect, a tax on housing wealth. Add the interest income the financial sector extracts from thirty year mortgages, and it becomes obvious that scarcity is not a market failure Westminster is struggling to fix. It is a revenue stream several powerful interests would rather not disturb. Build a million council homes at cost, rented to the people who need them rather than sold at whatever the market will bear, and you do not just house a generation. You shrink the tax base that funds the Treasury and the profit base that sustains the mortgage industry, and that is precisely why nobody with real power has done it.
A nation cannot scroll its way out of a housing crisis
Which brings us back to Pat McFadden on the sofa this week, and to the honest half of what he said. Social media probably is making some young people more anxious, less confident, worse equipped to walk into a job interview. That is a real and separate problem, and the Meta settlement and Starmer’s under-16 ban, due in force by spring 2027, may well do some good.
But a nation cannot scroll its way out of a housing crisis, and it cannot doomscroll its way into a construction apprenticeship that does not exist. Blaming the phone lets everyone in government off the hook for the ledger: for the tax revenue that depends on expensive houses, for the donor networks that shape which supermarket gets the press launch, for thirty years of choosing not to build. A workshop can help a young person write a CV. It cannot build the house that makes the CV worth writing.
Andy Burnham says his government is bringing back hope. Then let it prove that with bricks, not noticeboards. Build the council houses. Reopen the yards that train the people who build them. Tax housing wealth honestly instead of quietly depending on its scarcity. Do that, and the next generation will not need a supermarket to teach them what opportunity looks like. They will already be living in it.
A country that blames the algorithm for a crisis it built with planning permission has not run out of answers. It has simply chosen not to like the one sitting in front of it.
SOURCES & FURTHER READING
– Reuters: Number of UK young people not in work or education drops under 1 million
– UK Parliament: Register of Interests for Andy Burnham MP
– Bloomberg: Andy Burnham’s Donor List Led by Billionaire David Sainsbury, Register Shows
– J Sainsbury plc: Major Shareholders
– The Guardian: Burnham backtracks on spending housing fund only on building social homes
– Yahoo News UK: Burnham hails council house comeback with £10bn for 70,000 new homes
– Statista / HMRC: Stamp duty land tax receipts in the UK, 2011 to 2026
– Landlord Today: HMRC increases scrutiny of residential valuations
– Labour’s biggest donors backed Burnham for PM, disclosures reveal
– Irish Times: Meta to pay up to $16.7bn to settle children’s social media harm case
– GOV.UK: Social media to be banned for under-16s in landmark government move
– The Heartlands Tribune: Technical Education, The Hard Hat and the Graduation Cap (2026)
– The Heartlands Tribune: The Housing Crisis, Labour’s Missed Opportunity (2024)
