McFadden Flew to Rotterdam to Solve a Problem His Own Department Already Explained.
Pat McFadden has been to the Netherlands. He visited a Jongerenpunt, a Dutch youth hub, and came back impressed. The Netherlands has a NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) rate of 4.9 percent among 18 to 24 year olds. Britain's is 15.1 percent. McFadden's solution is to open 180 Youth Hubs over the next two years, rising to 360 by 2029, offering wraparound services, CV advice, housing support and apprenticeship pathways, backed by ยฃ2.5 billion over three years.
But he did not need to fly to Rotterdam. The explanation for the gap between Britain and the Netherlands is sitting in his own department's data.
Since 2020, 27 young non-EU migrants have been hired in Britain for every one young British worker. Non-EU youth employment has risen 355 percent. The young British workforce has grown by 0.3 percent. Over the same period, NEET numbers have risen by almost 250,000, now exceeding one million. The Centre for Social Justice published these figures, drawn from the government's own HMRC payroll data, on the same day Alan Milburn's review into youth worklessness concluded there was "no evidence" that immigration played any role. The government's own numbers say otherwise. McFadden's department has the evidence. It chose Rotterdam instead.
The ยฃ2.5 billion figure deserves scrutiny. Spread across three years and "almost one million young people," it amounts to roughly ยฃ800 per person per year. The government has separately confirmed it spends twenty-five times more paying unemployed young people benefits than it spends helping them find work. ยฃ2.5 billion against that backdrop is not a system reset. It is a press release with a budget line attached.
The document contains an admission worth dwelling on. It notes that Dutch youth report the second highest rate of depressive symptoms in the world, behind only Britain's, and that Dutch anxiety rates are only slightly lower than Britain's. It then concludes that "the difference is not health but how the country responds to it." This quietly demolishes years of government framing that attributed Britain's NEET crisis substantially to a mental health epidemic among young people. If a country with comparable mental health outcomes can achieve a NEET rate three times lower, mental health was never the primary explanation. The government has now admitted this in writing while continuing to commission reviews that lead with it.
What the Netherlands actually does, and what this document carefully avoids drawing any connection to, is maintain a labour market where 35 percent of young people pursue vocational training against 22 percent in Britain, and where over half of Dutch young people have workplace experience by age 19. That requires entry-level jobs to exist in sufficient numbers for young nationals to fill them. Britain's October budget did the opposite. The employer National Insurance rise and a near twenty percent jump in the youth minimum wage made entry-level hiring more expensive at the exact moment 27 migrants were being hired for every one British young person. Two policies, the same government, working in the same direction, both squeezing British youth out of the market the Netherlands keeps open for its own.
McFadden's Youth Hubs may help some young people navigate a broken system. They will not address why the system is broken. A generation of British youngsters has been priced out of the jobs that once gave their parents a start, replaced by imported labour at a rate of 27 to 1, while the minister responsible flew to Rotterdam to study a country that simply never created the problem Britain manufactured at home. The answer was never in the Netherlands. It was in the HMRC data, on his own desk, the whole time.
"The ยฃ2.5 billion figure deserves scrutiny. Spread across three years and 'almost one million young people,' it amounts to roughly ยฃ800 per person per year."