Labour market
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Skills
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Wellbeing and mental health

Left behind

Exploring the prevalence of youth worklessness due to ill health in different parts of the UK

Louise Murphy
Louise Murphy

This briefing note is part of the Young people’s future health inquiry, a three-year programme supported by the Health Foundation. It explores the prevalence of youth worklessness due to ill health in different parts of the UK.

We find that economic inactivity due to ill health among 18-24 year-olds has nearly doubled over the past decade, and is heavily concentrated among those with low levels of skills, with four-in-five young people who are too ill to work having only qualifications at GCSE-level or below.

There are considerable differences between parts of the UK, with young people in areas dominated by small towns and villages more likely to be workless due to ill health than those living in large cities such as Glasgow, Liverpool and London.

Key findings

  • There has been a sharp increase in the number of young people who are not working due to ill health. The number of 18-24-year-olds in this category has near-doubled in the last ten years, rising from 94,000 in 2012 to 185,000 in 2022. Today, almost one-in-four (23 per cent) workless young people are not working because of ill health, up from less than one-in-ten (8 per cent) in 2012.
  • Across the UK, 2.9 per cent of 18-24-year-olds were not working because they were unwell in the period 2020-2022. But when we look beneath this average, we find considerable range. Just 1.6 per cent of young people in East Anglia, and 1.7 per cent in both Inner London and Merseyside, were too unwell to work in 2020-2022, compared to 5.1 per cent in parts of the North East such as Darlington, Durham and Middlesbrough.
  • The most striking spatial difference we observe when it comes to rates of youth worklessness due to ill health is that between large cities and smaller places. We find that young people living in core cities such as London, Cardiff, Glasgow or Liverpool are the least likely to be workless because they are unwell. In 2020-2022, for example, 1.8 per cent of 18-24-year-olds in London, and 2.0 per cent of 18-24-year-olds in other core cities, were not working due to ill health. This contrasts with 3.4 per cent of 18-24-year-olds living in places dominated by small towns or villages such as Derbyshire, Devon and South Wales.
  • Of course, the type of 18-24-year-olds living in cities rather than smaller places varies considerably, and two compositional differences stand out. First, in 2020-2022, 45 per cent of young people in London and 42 per cent in other core cites were full-time students, a much larger proportion than in small towns or villages (32 per cent and 30 per cent respectively). Second, with the many opportunities they afford, cities are far more likely to attract graduates than smaller conurbations: 30 per cent of 18-24-year-olds in London, and 26 per cent of those in other core cities, were graduates in 2020-2022, compared to less than one-in-six (15 per cent) young people in small towns and villages.
  • The spatial variation we find when it comes to youth worklessness due to ill health speaks more to the sorting of young people from smaller settlements to core cities, and then the protective power of (higher) education, than it does to differences that stem directly from the places themselves. And there is further evidence that poor educational outcomes play a key role in being ‘left behind’. Shockingly, four-in-five 18-24-year-olds (79 per cent) who do not work because they are unwell only have qualifications at GCSE-level or below, compared to one-third of all young people. This combination of ill health and low qualification levels puts such young people at a double disadvantage: even if their health were to improve, their low skills would likely still leave them struggling in the labour market.
  • Any spell out of the labour market at a young age can have scarring effects on future employment prospects, but young people who are workless due to ill health are especially hard hit. Four-in-five young people (79 per cent) who are workless due to ill health have been workless for at least two years – compared to only a quarter (26 per cent) of young people who are unemployed.

Recommendations

  • Given that mental health problems are the most common reason for young people to be workless due to ill health, better mental health support must be available at the earliest possible stage to prevent young people from falling behind in the first instance. Children and young people’s mental health services are notoriously stretched, and there is also considerable variation by place: the average waiting time for this service stands at 41 days across England as a whole, but just 13 days in Leicester and West Leicestershire compared to 80 days in Sunderland. Likewise, NHS mental health support for adults is also hit and miss, especially compared to university students who have the additional safety net of mental health services provided by their institutions – estimated to be equivalent to £39 per student per year.
  • Alongside early health support, action is needed to help unwell young people catch up with their education later down the line. Given that the majority of young people who are workless due to ill health lack qualifications above GCSE level, efforts to increase the number of young people attending university or doing apprenticeships miss the mark. Instead, policy makers must invest to make it easier for adults to achieve GCSE and A Level skills (Levels 2 and 3) after leaving compulsory education, most obviously through funding courses leading to Level 2 and Level 3 qualifications for those aged 24 and above (currently statutory funding is only available up to the age of 23).
  • Boosting labour market participation is a priority for the Government, with policies aimed at encouraging people with health problems to enter the labour market front and centre of the recent Spring Budget. But worklessness due to ill health must not be seen solely an older-adult issue. There are 185,000 young people currently in that category – to put this in context, the policies announced in the Chancellor’s recent multi-billion-pound Spring Budget are expected to boost labour supply by 110,000. These young people, who are ‘left behind’ in so many different senses, deserve better.

 

Further reading

A hard day’s night
The labour market experience of low-to-middle income families
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Nye Cominetti, Louise Murphy
Get Britain’s Stats Working
Exploring alternatives to Labour Force Survey estimates
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Adam Corlett
Calculating the Real Living Wage for London and the rest of the UK: 2024
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Nye Cominetti, Louise Murphy
Louise Murphy
Louise Murphy Senior Economist