A Billion Pounds Can't Buy Formation

The UK Office for National Statistics published its latest labour market figures earlier this month. Among 16 to 24-year-olds, 16.1% are unemployed — the highest rate in eleven years. Nearly a million young people are neither earning nor learning. The government's response is a billion-pound package: wage subsidies, jobs guarantees, expanded apprenticeships, Youth Hubs in every local area. But the numbers point at something the policy cannot reach. This is not only a story about unemployment rates. It is a story about what happens when we stop teaching young men what work is for before the labour market ever gets a chance to find them.

What the numbers don't explain

New UCL research published last week puts a sharper edge on the headline figure. One in seven young people across the UK are not in education, employment or training at age 23 — and unlike the transient NEET figures for younger teenagers, this is persistent disconnection, not a temporary gap year drift. Young men make up a disproportionate share of this group, and the patterns of disconnection look different for them, though the principle applies across genders.

One figure stands out: young adults from the most disadvantaged homes are almost four times as likely to be adrift as their peers from the most well-off backgrounds. That gap does not close with a jobs guarantee because the labour market did not create it. What differs between those two groups is not opportunity alone but readiness for it — the presence or absence of structure, of adult expectation, of people who modelled what showing up looks like and why it matters. Boys from homes where those things existed are navigating the system. Boys without them are not. A subsidised placement arrives, at best, a decade too late.

The UCL researchers also found that boys with behavioural difficulties and mental health challenges in childhood, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, face the steepest odds at 23. Those are formation failures, not labour market characteristics, set in motion years before any policy intervention could reach them.

What a jobs guarantee actually provides

Credit where it is due. Getting a young man into work is better than leaving him without it, and the scale of the government's ambition reflects a genuine reckoning with how serious this has become. This is not a partisan point. No government of any stripe, Conservative or Labour, has found a way to fund what happens before opportunity arrives. That is not a political failure peculiar to one party. It is a limit inherent to what policy can do.

A jobs guarantee addresses the symptom without touching the cause. That is not an argument against the guarantee — it is an argument for not mistaking it for a cure. A subsidised six-month placement gives a young man an income, a start date, and a foot in a door. It does not tell him what work means beyond the wage, or what kind of man he is becoming through it. It does not provide a foreman who notices when he is struggling, or a colleague twenty years older who takes him seriously enough to challenge him — men who understand that the discipline of turning up is not separate from character but part of how it is built. Those things are not in the scheme documentation. They could not be. That is not a failure of design but a limit of the form.

The question no policy can answer

What produces a young man who expects something of himself before anyone else expects it of him?

I have nine children. What I notice, watching them move into adult life, is that confidence does not come from being told they are capable. It comes from having been expected to meet a standard and having met it. That experience is ordinary in households where someone holds the line consistently over years, and not ordinary everywhere else. Now imagine its absence — not for a week or a term, but for a decade. A boy at 14 with no man in his life who holds a line, who notices whether he showed up, who cares enough to be disappointed when he doesn't. The UCL data is a picture of what that absence produces at 23.

Those behavioural difficulties in childhood, compounded by disadvantage, were not caused by the labour market. They were set in motion years earlier, in the slow, unglamorous work of becoming someone — or the absence of anyone present to guide that work. By the time a jobs guarantee finds these young men, the question it is trying to answer has already been answered badly by everything that came before it.

Policy can stabilise a system. Only people can shape a soul.

What this means for you

If you are reading this, you are not among the million. But there is almost certainly someone in your orbit who is drifting — a younger brother who has gone quiet, a mate who stopped expecting anything from himself, a colleague who turns up but is clearly somewhere else. The government's billion will not reach him the way a conversation will.

That conversation does not have to be significant to be consistent. A standing Saturday morning coffee, a text every Tuesday asking what he is doing tomorrow, an invitation to come along to something you are already doing. It is not grand. It is just regular, and regular is what formation requires.

Close

The question the data leaves unanswered is not who will fund the next scheme. It is who will sit beside a young man who has stopped expecting anything of himself and refuse to leave. That cannot be commissioned or scaled. It can only be done. The statistics describe someone. Go and find him before someone else fails to.

ForgeHub (theforge-hub.com) serves as my writing platform for men seeking practical wisdom, developing authentic skills, and reflecting on how to live purposefully in a complex world. I write about family formation and cultural analysis at Happy Family Better World. My new family advisory site is at richardmorrissey.org. My political writing can be found at Medium.