‘I just got AI emails rejecting my application – or no reply at all’: this is the soul-crushing reality of being a Neet

Alan Milburn describes them as a ‘lost generation’. Those I spoke to just want to know what they have to do to finally get a job – and a chance in life

Callum Atkinson is 23 years old, and lives in the Greater Manchester town of Rochdale. Until very recently, he was one of hundreds of thousands of young people in the UK reckoned not to be in education, employment or training: what officialspeak rather coldly terms a Neet, and therefore part of a huge national problem being investigated by the former New Labour high-up Alan Milburn, whose final report on young people and work is due any day now, and will be a big, hyped-up political event.

Milburn – quite rightly – thinks the UK’s estimated 981,000 Neets represent the profound risk of “a lost generation” and a “moral crisis” that is already upon us. If you are interested in matters of finance as well as ethics, you may also be aware that the annual cost of maintaining such young people was recently put at £125bn, which is more than the British state spends on either education or defence.

Until a month or so ago, Callum told me last week, he was one tiny element of those statistics. He has three A-levels graded at A, B and C, respectively in maths, further maths and computer science: although educational failure is a major factor in the current crisis, 21% of Neets have at least one A-level or its equivalent, and 15% have graduated from university. What his life so far does point up, however, is the labyrinthine lunacy and callousness of the modern labour market, and how its serial failures are often only finally mended by small, ground-level organisations.

Six months ago, his last spurt of employment – working in finance, “organising invoices, making sure suppliers got paid on time, doing Excel reports” – lasted three months, before he collided with problems in his personal life and fell into a spell of depression. When he was let go by his last employer, he was put on universal credit. Most days, Callum told me, he sat in bed applying for jobs using his phone. “Maybe 600 or 700 at least. And the most I usually got back was an AI email saying, ‘I’m sorry, we’ve decided not to go through with your application, please try again next time.’ Or there was no reply at all.”

And so to some good news. Not long ago, Callum was pointed in the direction of a new Manchester-based charity called Breakout. The people there arranged mentoring sessions and work experience placements. He is now an undergraduate at the University of Salford, studying computer science and artificial intelligence – but what his life experience so far seems to have left him with is only the vaguest sense of his own future. When I asked him for his thoughts on the subject, there was an uneasy silence. “My plan is just to get through university,” he eventually said.

Breakout was founded by Roman Dibden, a spirited 30-year-old who himself has experience of being a Neet. When we spoke last week about the Milburn review, he said he had one big concern: that the kind of outsourcing corporates who tend to land government contracts would be the main beneficiaries of its recommendations. The fact that Milburn wants local authorities to deliver his recommendations, Dibden said, may well force such companies into a cosmetic reinvention: “My fear is that will see the same big providers putting on a grassroots badge and carrying on like before,” he said. “But these are real human lives we’re talking about. We need people who actually get it.”

Humanity, however, is a waning factor in the UK’s increasingly bamboozling jobs machine. Dibden told me he was getting an increasing sense of recruitment systems in which applications written using AI are then robotically read by machines that respond with automated knock-backs, a process that renders trying to get a job about as meaningful as buying a scratchcard or lottery ticket. “People can give the jobcentre evidence of so many hours of job search because they’ve scattergunned it out,” he said. “But it leaves young people completely at their wits’ end.”

The day after that conversation, I spoke to another 23-year-old on Breakout’s books: Raihan Ali, who last did any paid work at Christmas in 2025, when he temped at a discount store for 16 hours a week. Like Callum, he is no academic slouch: though the pandemic meant he didn’t sit any formal GCSE exams, he got the second-to-top grade – an eight – in maths and combined science, and a B and two Cs at A-level in maths, physics and chemistry. Once he had decided to take a vocational rather than academic post-school route, it took him nearly a year to get an apprenticeship, doing admin for a chemical company. He was paid £12,000 a year: soon enough, he realised that he wanted to get into accountancy, but an apprenticeship in that line of work lasted only a matter of months.

“It was kind of the dream job for me,” he told me. “But it was fast-paced; very demanding. And going in with basically little-to-no experience, I just couldn’t keep up. Six months later, I’m sat down with a senior manager and HR and they tell me, ‘We can’t keep you.’”

That rupture happened in early 2024. In Hyde, on the eastern edge of Greater Manchester, Raihan lives with his mother – who, like him, currently depends on universal credit – and two siblings, who are still in education. He has long felt a deep responsibility to provide for all four of his family. “I just thought, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do now?’ I had money coming in, and suddenly there was nothing.” He then began a purgatorial two years of constant job applications, broken only by his brief spell of part-time retail work.

“I’ve just ended up thinking that the good things that have happened to me have been sheer luck,” he said. “And all the bad things have been more like, ‘Well, yeah, no one wants me. I’m not good enough for that.’” On countless occasions, he has been told that he was effectively the runner-up. “And that’s just a terrible feeling, because what can I do to make someone believe that I’m actually the one that they want, rather than always being behind someone else?”

I had two last questions. The first was about his Bangladeshi heritage, and a grim fact cited in the interim report Milburn published in May last year, which pointed out that although Neet rates for young people from Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds run at just below the national average, total adult unemployment among those in the same category currently runs at three times the rate of those classified as white British. “I’ve worried about things like that,” Raihan said. “When they see the name ‘Raihan Ali’ on my CV, do they not actually want me from that alone? I try not to think about them, ’cos it’s out of my control.” He paused. “But yeah. Yeah.”

We were talking via Zoom, and I noticed another of my open tabs, a report about the Milburn review, which bluntly pointed out that our cash-strapped prime minister will “need to find billions of pounds more to fund employment schemes if he wants to get young people back to work”. On an invest-to-save basis, Burnham agreed with that suggestion last week; by Saturday, there were news stories about an extra £6bn.

After 45 minutes spent talking about a country that seemingly cannot offer a future to even some of its comparative achievers, Raihan hinted that from his perspective, one other thing was needed: deep change to some of the most basic ways in which our economy works. Did he, I asked him, have any faith that things might get better? “I think the solutions will just need to be, like, big enough to actually make a difference,” he said. “You can’t take small steps here and there, can you? There’s going to have to be a gigantic amount of change for anything to actually work.”