Being a well-balanced individual who knows how to enjoy time off work, I spent part of the sweltering half term break reading the interim report – Young People and Work - by The Rt Hon Alan Milburn, looking at those young people not in education, employment or training (NEETs).[1] It presents a sobering analysis.
The report contains many numbers: 314,000 young people aged 18–24 in England in 2023–24 were neither working, nor studying, nor claiming.[2] Out of work and out of sight, with no institution responsible for them. They sit within the larger figure of nearly one million young people not in education, employment or training — sixty per cent of whom have never had a job, up from forty per cent in 2005, at a cumulative cost to the economy of £125bn a year.[3]
The report is unflinching about cause. These young people are not a soft generation — eighty-four per cent of those surveyed said they wanted a job, education or training — but a set of institutions and policies built for a different era have seemingly escalated the problem rather than defused it.
What caught my eye, half term notwithstanding, was a box two-thirds of the way through the report, titled “Transport and housing: the barriers nobody counts.”[4]
It is an arresting phrase but, respectfully to Mr Milburn, not quite correct. As planners, we do count housing; indeed, it has become a trope to say we do it too much.[5] And yet, too often, we lose sight of why the numbers matter. Milburn helps supply some of that meaning, and it is worth taking his analysis back into the planning system to inform the often-difficult debates on housing targets in development plans, on the merits of individual proposals, and - as now seems likely - a reopening of the national policy debate.
What the report sees
Another: “I feel like 20 years ago, people my age, they’d be like, yeah, in the next five years I’ll own a house. Because everything starts there, right? Like stability.”[7]
The report states:
“That link between housing and stability came up again and again. What has gone is not just the prospect of ownership but the sense that effort will lead somewhere solid. Renting felt insecure, expensive and sometimes unsafe. Young people described family homes with roofs that had fallen in, no windows and landlords who did not respond.” [8]
It is precise about the mechanism:
“The interaction between the housing crisis and youth labour market access is direct. Young people who cannot afford to live independently near employment centres are constrained to their parental home and the local labour market it sits within.” [9]
The share of 18–34-year-olds living with parents has risen from around a quarter in the late 1990s to nearly forty per cent by 2021–22.[10] A young person in a high-NEET area with weak demand cannot relocate to where the work is; housing costs, benefit rules and family ties anchor them in place.[11] The DWP’s system of employment support, however well reformed, cannot fully compensate for that geography.
None of this ought to be news to anyone engaged in planning for housing. Indeed, a very similar argument is made in Chapter 1 of the New Towns Taskforce report a year ago.[12] There the case for building at scale – and much of the Taskforce’s approach to site selection - rested on the proposition that housing shortages limit labour mobility, worsen health, disrupt education and delay family formation.
The evidence on why housing matters
The Resolution Foundation’s Moving Matters found that the propensity of young private renters to move home and job simultaneously fell by two-thirds between 1997 and 2018, with housing costs a principal headwind.[13]
On attainment, the Children’s Commissioner tracked more than 600,000 pupils and found a stark adverse relationship between housing instability and GCSE results.[14] A UCL study published in December 2025 linked the Millennium Cohort Study to the National Pupil Database and put numbers on it: children in poor-quality housing at age seven missed 15.5 more school days across their compulsory education and scored 2–5% lower in standardised tests, with damp and overcrowding the strongest predictors.[15] One in seven English households lives in a home that fails to meet standards.[16]
One of Milburn’s findings is that mental health now drives the NEET numbers: the share reporting a work-limiting condition has risen from 26% in 2015 to 44% in 2025.[17] A 2023 NIHR systematic review of fifty-nine studies found housing insecurity associated with anxiety, depression, self-harm and suicidal ideation among children and young people.[18] The Marmot reviews established housing as a primary social determinant of health more than a decade ago; the 2020 follow-up found little had improved.[19]
Clearly, it’s not just about housing, which can be a symptom of problems as well as a cause. But the aggregation of insecure tenure, cold homes, overcrowding, the anxiety of never being quite settled, is the soil in which the health-related detachment Milburn describes takes root.
Supply is the foundation
All of this points to the need for better quality housing, better welfare rules, stronger tenant protections, improved transport and a properly funded social housing programme.
But it remains important to address the underlying arithmetic of too many households chasing too few homes in the parts of the country with the most economic opportunity. The latest household projections indicate an average of 242,000 additional households per year 2022-2032, and yet net housing additions over the first three years of that period averaged just 221,500. [20] That compounds historic undersupply, with 1.5 million households in England (6% of all households) containing a concealed household (defined as having at least one additional adult present who would like to buy or rent their own accommodation but could not afford to do so.[21] We are well short of the 300,000 annualised figure represented by the Government’s 1.5m homes ambition or the 371,000 in the Standard Method, figures which most sensible people believe are the absolute minimum benchmarks for begining to address the housing crsis.[22]
Effective planning for more housing, unlocking deliverable land to address housing need in line with the Standard Method, will increase the overall supply of homes but also help to moderate house price growth and improve relative affordability over time, so that over the medium term, income growth outpaces the rise in house prices.[23] Owner occupation remains, as the English Housing Survey doggedly records, the tenure the great majority of people still want.[24] The aspiration has not died, but the expectation has.
Work by the OBR assumes a positive supply elasticity in its forecasts, i.e. that sustained increases in housing delivery of all types will help stabilise prices.[25] Greater London Authority research found that new market housing improves affordability both directly and through the chain of moves it enables, with the greatest benefits occurring within the same housing market area.[26] Research by Public First used Land Registry data to test the price effects of building new homes at higher price points and found that the market filtering meant building larger homes allows people to trade up, kicking off a chain of moves that frees up smaller and cheaper homes; a small increase in the proportion of high value homes would make entry-level homes around £2,500 cheaper to buy.[27]
Further, a substantial proportion of affordable housing is delivered through section 106 agreements,[28] albeit this model is under pressure due to viability difficulties, providing 36% of all affordable homes delivered in 2024-2025, down from the longer term average of 44-47%.
Delivering more of what matters
Milburn’s report is interim – providing a diagnosis not a solution. The final report promises a “coherent participation system for early adulthood.”
It remains to be seen whether this will include specific recommendations for measures to tackle the housing crisis; that Milburn’s interim report is prepared under the auspices of DWP and elides more specific analysis of housing supply, suggests its attention will lie elsewhere and understandably so.
But when the young woman in Milburn’s report talks about housing and says “everything starts there, right? Like stability,” that is describing the relationship between a secure home and the capacity to plan, to move, to take a risk on a job — the behaviours on which a well-functioning economy and society depends.
Milburn’s interim report is a cri de coeur for doubling down on the Government’s ambitions to drive up the supply of new housing of all types, and addressing the barriers that stand in the way of its delivery: a timely reminder to MHCLG as it draws together the contents of the new NPPF and turns its attention to removing grit from the planning process.[29]
The recent local election results and political turbulence facing the Government seem likely to make it more challenging to progress some New Towns, Spatial Development Strategies and Local Plans in many areas.[30] The recent utterances from Andy Burnham in the Mackerfield by-election also suggest a possible unwinding of the Government’s chosen agenda for how to boost supply, assuming his political ambitions are realised.[31] For the foreseeable future, it will be incumbent on those bringing forward housing proposals to make clear why new housing matters. The story told by the Milburn’s report is a good place to start.
Footnotes
[1] Alan Milburn, Young People and Work: Interim Report, Department for Work and Pensions, 28 May 2026. 217 pages; I regret nothing.
[2] Ibid., Chapter 1. The 314,000 were aged 18–24, NEET, and not in receipt of benefits — out of work, out of sight, and below the threshold of any institution’s responsibility.
[3] Ibid., Foreword and Chapter 1. The £125bn annual cost, the 60% who have never worked (up from 40% in 2005), and the 84% wanting to work are all drawn from these sections.
[4] Ibid., box headed ‘Transport and housing: the barriers nobody counts’, between paras. 281 and 282.
[5] TCPA (2020) Planning 2020 ‘One Year On’ 21st Century Slums? This suggests criticisms of poor design by politicians “fails to understand the impact of the ‘planning by numbers’ approach of the NPPF, which displaces vision and creativity”. Whether that analysis stands up is a topic for another day.
[6] Ibid., para. 100.
[7] Ibid., para. 101. The same group described renting as insecure, expensive and ‘sometimes unsafe’ — family homes with roofs fallen in, broken windows and unresponsive landlords (para. 102).
[8] Ibid., para 102
[10] Resolution Foundation analysis cited in Milburn (2026), green box. The underlying source is ONS Census 2021 / Resolution Foundation intergenerational work; see Resolution Foundation, Housing Hurdles, December 2024.
[11] Joseph Rowntree Foundation, cited in Milburn (2026), green box, on housing insecurity as a persistent driver of employment instability among young adults. See the JRF report here
[12] New Towns Taskforce, Report to Government, MHCLG, September 2025, Chapter 1 — which, in the interests of full disclosure, Lichfields helped prepare.
[13] Resolution Foundation, Moving Matters: Housing Costs and Labour Market Mobility, September 2019. The two-thirds fall in the joint propensity to move home and job is the headline finding; housing costs are identified as a significant headwind.
[14] Children’s Commissioner for England, The Impact of Housing Instability on Children’s GCSE Grades, April 2025.
[15] Baranyi, G., Harron, K. & Fitzsimons, E., ‘Housing quality and educational outcomes in England’, International Journal of Population Data Science, 10(4), December 2025. Damp, overcrowding and inadequate heating were the strongest predictors.
[17] Milburn (2026), para. 56. The share of NEETs citing mental health as their primary condition has almost doubled since 2011.
[18] Hock, E. et al., ‘Exploring the impact of housing insecurity on the health and well-being of children and young people: a systematic review’, Public Health Research, NIHR, 11(13), 2023. The direction of effect is, in the authors’ words, ‘overwhelmingly negative’.
[19] Marmot, M. et al., Health Equity in England: The Marmot Review 10 Years On, Institute of Health Equity, 2020, building on Fair Society, Healthy Lives (2010).
[20] ONS 2022-based household projections (released October 2025) and MHCLG Net housing additions Live Table 118
[24] English Housing Survey, various years; New Towns Taskforce (2025), Chapter 1, para. 21: ‘Owner occupation remains the most prevalent and popular housing tenure and must be part of future supply.’
[25] OBR (2014) Working paper No.6 Forecasting house prices https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/WP06-final-v2.pdf
[26] GLA (2023) Housing Research Note 10 The affordability impacts of new housing supply: A summary of recent research
[27] Public First (2025) Why building more homes of all types helps first time buyers: a research study to test the price effects of new homes at higher price points on the affordability of homes at lower price points
[29] Both on the Government’s agenda, as the Minister of State’s speech to UKREiiF on 19th May 2026 made clear: See here
[30] Planning (2026) Seven key planning and development implications from the local election results https://www.planningresource.co.uk/article/1957896/seven-key-planning-development-implications-local-election-results (£)
[31] In his first campaign update video, posted on 26th May, he says: “I was with residents in Winstanley last night talking about Green Belt issues, and I know we need a change in the borough, shift the burden of development from greenfield to the local centres, and that’s a change nationally”