给我一个机会：如何激励雇主雇佣无教育、就业或培训经历的青年

Nye Cominetti, Julia Diniz, Lindsay Judge, Imogen Stone & Greg ThwaitesJune 2026 Acknowledgements This report has benefited from the input of many people from bothinside and outside Resolution Foundation. We thank all the externalexperts with whom we discussed our method and also those whocommented on our findings. We are also grateful to all our colleagues Download This document is available to download as a free PDF at: resolutionfoundation.org/publications Citation If you are using this document in your own writing, our preferred citation is: N. Cominetti et al.,Take a chance on me: How can employers be incentivised to employ NEETs?,Resolution Permission to share This document is published under the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial NoDerivatives 3.0 England and Wales Licence. This allows anyone to download, reuse, reprint, Summary Barely a week seems to go by these days without one report or another highlightingthe challenges firms face when it comes to employing young people in the UK today.Whether it is the rising costs involved, or the quality of work their fresh-faced recruitsprovide in return, employers often signal a reluctance to hire young adults as theytransition into the workforce. In many respects, this is not new: all else equal, firms would It is important to keep this problem into perspective, however. Recent ResolutionFoundation research showed, for example, that the UK is no laggard internationallywhen it comes to youth employment. Added to this, in 2024, one-third (33 per cent)of employers indicated they had taken on recent education leavers, no lower than 10years earlier in 2014 (31 per cent). But when recent policy reforms have been criticised We begin by considering a policy change that is often implicated in the rising NEETnumbers in recent years: increases in the minimum wage. In April 2023, for example,the rate for 18-20-year-olds was equivalent to 72 per cent of the adult rate; that figurenow stands at 85 per cent. We estimate that if the ratio between the adult and youthminimum wage rates had remained at its 2023 level, employers would have hired an But it is not just minimum wage policy that has been problematised in the NEETsdebate. In 2024, the Government also raised the rate of employer National Insurancecontributions (NICs) and reduced the earnings threshold at which they are paid, a people find entry-level jobs. However, we estimate that the effect on youth employmentof reversing these changes would be underwhelming, not least because employers payno NICs for the vast majority of under 21s under current rules. We estimate that revertingto the 2024 threshold for under 25s would raise youth employment by 7,000, at a cost of£137,000 per additional worker (and a total cost to the Exchequer of £1 billion). Scrapping Overall, then, tax cuts such as these are a very expensive way to boost youthemployment, with most of the spend simply paid to employers who would have takenon young workers anyway. An alternative is to focus money on the point at whichyoung people are hired, or to target the sort of young people whom employers might beespecially reluctant to hire. So, how do these more targeted interventions measure up?In March 2026, the Government announced that 60,000 Youth Jobs Grants would beavailable over the next three years, paid to employers that hire an 18-24-year-old who had We estimate a similar per-job price tag for the Jobs Guarantee, a scheme that offers firmsa six-month wage subsidy (equivalent to 25 hours at the minimum wage) if they take onan 18-24-year-old who has been on UC for at least 18 months. The flow rate into work forthis group in the absence of intervention is (predictably) lower than for the target groupfor the Youth Jobs Grant (35 per cent compared to 57 per cent), but with such a generous Overall, there is a clear trade-off between efficiency and scale when it comes to demand-side support. So, is it possible to simply extend the targeted schemes with no lossof efficiency? Our analysis suggests that it is, albeit in different ways. The number ofyoung people who could be eligible for a Youth Jobs Grant easily exceeds the number of could also be boosted if the payment structure was reformed). The same does not holdtrue for the Jobs Guarantee, where likely demand is close to current provision. Here, werecommend that the programme be extended to a wider group including young people Finally, we consider one further tack the Government could pursue in its quest to boostemployer demand for younger workers, and that is to reform apprenticeship funding.Changes have been introduced in England in recent years to target the Growth and SkillsLevy (GSL) funding more effectively – for example, it can now only be used by employersto fund apprenticeships in certain ‘growth’ sectors, and to support qualifications atgraduate level or below – but we estimate that 44 per cent of apprenticeships will still Incentivising firms to take on more you