Britain’s ‘NEETs’ aren’t what they used to be

Remember Neets, the mainly-young people who are ‘not in employment, education or training’? A decade ago they were seen as a group which had grown at alarming speed during the economic crisis on 2008/09. Many older people, by contrast, were continuing to work for longer, possibly as a result of their pensions having diminished in value. Following Covid, however, the profile of the working population has changed sharply again. Your typical Neet now is not a school-leaver who has failed to find anything useful to do with their lives – it is a professional aged 50-70 who has decided to throw in the towel prematurely.

The number of people counted as economically inactive by the Office of National Statistics grew by 522,000 between October – December 2019 and the same period in 2021. Remarkably, 94.4 per cent of this change was among the over-50s, with professional occupations the single biggest contributor.