The human cost of deprivation 

The news that in one Northern city, 15 percent of Neets, those young people not in education, employment or training, are dead within ten years in immensely depressing. It is a reminder of the horrendous toll that drugs and social breakdown take on our society.

The director general of schools, who revealed this, stresses that these numbers shouldn’t be taken to be typical of the country as a whole. But seeing as we don’t have numbers for the rest of the country, this was a local study, it is impossible to know how serious the situation is nationally.  

One can talk in policy terms about possible solutions to this problem. But what I think is so worrying about this statistic is that it suggests that there is emerging a hardcore of deprivation which is so extreme that it is beyond the ability of either society or government to reach it.