Britain's youth jobs crisis, the Dutch answer, and the industry best placed to respond

There is a number worth sitting with before anything else is said. One million. That is roughly how many young people in Britain are now not in education, employment or training. Not on a gap year. Not between things. Out. And the shape of that million has changed in a way that should worry anyone who cares about where the next generation of workers comes from.

For most of the last twenty-five years, the story was youth unemployment. Young people who wanted work and could not find it. That is a hard problem, but it is a recoverable one, because the ambition is intact and the labour market eventually turns. What we have now is different. Nearly six in ten young people who are NEET today are economically inactive. They are not looking for work at all. More striking still, six in ten of them have never had a job of any kind, up from four in ten in 2005. At the exact point in life when a person should be building confidence, learning the habits of showing up, and taking a first unglamorous step onto a ladder, a growing share are standing entirely outside the building.

That is why the language has hardened. Alan Milburn's review into young people and work does not describe a wobble in the figures. It describes a generational fault line, and it warns that on the current trajectory one in six young people could be NEET within five years. The word being used now, in government and in the serious press, is existential. It is the right word. A country that cannot connect its young to work is a country quietly deciding to shrink.

What the Dutch actually do

I should declare a bias here, because it is a useful one. This is not abstract for me. I spent three months working in the Netherlands for BAM, the Dutch construction group, based between their offices in Gouda and The Hague, and it left a mark. BAM is instructive precisely because it is not exotic. It is the same group that operates across the UK, running the same kind of projects under the same commercial pressures. Yet the way the Dutch side brought people through, the seriousness with which training and progression were treated as everyone's business rather than an afterthought, and the plain competence of young workers who had come up through the vocational route, were of a different order. I came away impressed, and slightly frustrated, because none of it looked like magic. It looked like a set of choices we could make and mostly have not.

Into this comes the Netherlands, held up as the country that has cracked it. The headline comparison is stark. The Dutch NEET rate among eighteen to twenty-four year olds is around 4.9 per cent, the lowest in Europe. The equivalent UK figure is 15.1 per cent. The Resolution Foundation has put it plainly: if Britain matched the Dutch rate, roughly 600,000 more young people would be in work or education right now.

The instinct is to look for the single lever the Dutch pulled. There is not one. There are three things working together, and the interaction is the point.

The first is a refusal to let anyone drift. Dutch law carries what is called the kwalificatieplicht, a qualification obligation. A young person is required to stay in education or training until they either earn a recognised qualification or turn eighteen. The design philosophy behind it has a name that translates neatly: no dead ends. Every route leads somewhere, and no one is allowed to quietly fall out of the system unnoticed at sixteen and disappear.

The second is genuine parity of esteem for the vocational route, backed by real infrastructure rather than warm words. Around sixty per cent of Dutch pupils go through pre-vocational secondary education, and from there into MBO, the country's upper-secondary vocational system, which offers more than seven hundred programmes. The part that matters most for anyone in construction is the dual pathway, the BBL. On that route a student spends at least sixty per cent of their time in paid work at an accredited company and the rest in the classroom, typically four days on site and one day at college. They earn while they learn, they are a real employee under a real contract, and they come out with a nationally recognised diploma and, very often, a permanent job at the firm that trained them.

None of that happens by accident. It sits on a foundation of employer ownership. Companies do not treat training as the state's job that occasionally lands on them. They co-own it. There are over one hundred sectoral training levies through which industries fund their own skills pipelines, and a national body, the SBB, whose entire purpose is to broker the relationship between colleges and companies, accredit firms as approved training employers, and make sure the practical training a young person receives is real and supervised. The connective tissue between education and work is not left to chance or goodwill. It is somebody's actual job.

The third is the front door. The Dutch built one-stop shops for young people, the Jongerenpunt, or youth points, where a person can walk in and get everything in one place: careers advice, help with a CV, housing support, mental health support. The governing assumption, and this is the sentence worth stealing, is that inactivity is a last resort. Not a category you are filed under. A last resort, reached only after everything else has been tried.

The honest caveats

It would be dishonest to present the Dutch model as flawless or straightforwardly transplantable, and the credibility of the whole argument depends on saying so.

Start with the streaming. Dutch children are sorted at around the age of twelve into academic or vocational tracks, based on teacher recommendation and primary-school testing. That early sort is efficient, and it is also the most criticised feature of the system, because deciding a child's direction at twelve risks baking in the disadvantages they were born with. It is a genuine trade-off, not a free win, and Britain would be right to be cautious about importing it wholesale.

Then there is the mental health point, which cuts against the easy narrative. You might assume the Dutch keep young people engaged because Dutch young people are simply doing better. They are not. Dutch teenagers report depressive symptoms at close to the highest rate in Europe, second only to the UK, and their anxiety levels sit only slightly below ours. The difference between a 4.9 per cent NEET rate and a 15.1 per cent one is therefore not a story about healthier young people. It is a story about a system that keeps struggling young people connected to work and study before the disconnection becomes permanent. That is a more useful and more hopeful conclusion, because a system is something you can build. A national temperament is not.

Finally, the Dutch approach grew out of a consensus culture, the so-called polder model, where government, employers and unions genuinely negotiate and genuinely commit. You cannot legislate that into existence. But you can copy the behaviours it produces, and that is where Britain's opportunity actually sits.

Why this lands twice as hard in construction

For most readers of the general press, the youth crisis is a social story. For anyone in construction it is also, and inescapably, a workforce story. The two crises are not neighbours. They are the same crisis viewed from opposite ends.

Look at the age profile. Around thirty-five per cent of the construction workforce is over fifty. Only about nineteen per cent is under twenty-five. By the mid-2030s, on current projections, more than three quarters of a million workers are set to retire out of the industry. The CITB's latest Workforce Outlook estimates the sector needs an average of roughly 41,200 additional workers every year between 2026 and 2030, which is to say something close to a quarter of a million people over the period, simply to keep pace with demand from housing, infrastructure and net-zero retrofit.

Now set that against the pipeline. Apprenticeship starts in construction have fallen sharply over the past decade, and of those who start, fewer than half finish, which leaves the industry with well under nine thousand fully trained apprentices a year against a need many times that size. Only around five per cent of students say they would even consider a career in construction. The post-Brexit reduction in EU labour took a further prop away, with the EU share of London's construction workforce collapsing from roughly forty-two per cent to around eight per cent in the space of three years.

Put the two ends together and the picture is almost absurd. On one side, an industry desperate for a quarter of a million new entrants, offering real wages, real progression, real security, and work that is visible and tangible at the end of every day. On the other, a million young people standing outside the labour market, six in ten of whom have never held a job. The gap between those two facts is not a shortage of demand and it is not, whatever the caricature suggests, a shortage of willing young people. Colleges in the North East and elsewhere report strong demand for construction courses. The CITB's own regional voices are clear that interest from the next generation is not the missing ingredient. The bottleneck is the connective tissue. It is the shortage of employers set up, supported and willing to take a young unproven person and turn them into a tradesperson.

That is precisely the thing the Dutch built on purpose.

What Britain is already doing, and where it falls short

To be fair to the current effort, Britain is not standing still. The government has committed £2.5 billion over three years to a Youth Guarantee, aiming to open up to half a million opportunities to earn and learn. It is rolling out Dutch-style Youth Hubs, starting with around 180 and scaling towards 360 by 2029, placed where young people already are, in community centres, libraries and football clubs. The Work and Pensions Secretary went to Rotterdam and looked at the youth points in person. There is a £2,000 incentive for small firms taking on a sixteen to twenty-four year old, National Insurance relief for younger workers, and an Education Estates Strategy that ties school building programmes to thousands of apprenticeship and T-level placements. Over a lifetime, the average apprentice is estimated to contribute around £25 billion to the English economy. The direction of travel is right and the money is real.

But money and buildings are the easy part, and here is the risk. You can open 360 youth hubs and still fail, if all you have built is a nicer waiting room. The Dutch lesson was never really about the hubs. It was about what the hubs are connected to: an employer base that treats training as its own responsibility, a national broker whose job is to make the introduction between college and company, and a cultural expectation that every young person has a route and is walked down it by an actual human being.

That is the part no budget line delivers on its own. And it is the part where Britain, and construction in particular, already holds the tools.

We have the leaders and the teachers. The question is whether we use them.

This is the heart of it. The instinct to look enviously at the Dutch can obscure an obvious truth. We are not short of capable people who could bring young workers through. Every established firm is full of experienced tradespeople, site managers, commercial leads and directors who learned the job from somebody, and who could teach it to somebody else. Every college has staff who want their students to land somewhere real. What has been missing is not the raw material. It is the deliberate act of connecting the two, and the willingness to own it rather than wait for the state to.

There is a hard-edged version of this that needs saying, because it is the version that actually works, and it is the one you raised. A route into work is not a soft landing. The Dutch model is not indulgent. It is demanding. No dead ends is not the same as no expectations. A young person on a BBL contract is on site four days a week, held to the standard of the firm they work for, expected to show up, graft, and earn the diploma. The support is real and so is the obligation. That pairing is the whole trick. We do young people no favours by lowering the bar to get them through the door, because the thing that actually rebuilds a person who has never worked is being trusted with real work and held to a real standard. Confidence is a by-product of competence, and competence is a by-product of graft. The kindest thing the construction industry can offer the young people currently written off is not sympathy. It is a hard job, a clear standard, and someone who takes the time to bring them up to it.

What I watched BAM do well in the Netherlands was not a special initiative with a name and a launch event. It was simply the default assumption that bringing a young person up to standard was part of the work, not a distraction from it. That assumption is the whole difference, and it is a cultural setting, not a budget line.

This is where the industry can lead rather than wait. Not by lobbying for another scheme, though the schemes help, but by doing the Dutch thing at company level. By becoming, in effect, an accredited training employer whether or not anyone accredits you. By pairing every new entrant with someone experienced enough to teach and generous enough to bother. By treating a placement not as a box to tick on a public-sector project but as the recruitment of a future foreman. The firms that get good at bringing raw young people through will, within a decade, be the only ones with a foreman to spare.

Some of this is already stirring. Mentoring partnerships between industry and universities, professional communities that deliberately connect senior leaders with new entrants, structured routes that put an experienced name alongside a young one: these are the small, unglamorous acts of connective tissue that the Dutch simply do at national scale. Britain is capable of the same. We have proven we can copy the hubs and write the cheques. The harder and more valuable thing is to copy the relationships.

One million young people are currently outside the building. A quarter of a million construction jobs are waiting inside it. The bridge between those two numbers is not a policy. It is a person who is willing to show a young one how the work is done, and to expect them to do it well. We have those people. We always did. The Dutch just decided to use them.