Scrolling in bedrooms after midnight a driver of youth joblessness – Milburn
Social media-related anxiety is increasing economic inactivity among young people, according to the former minister tasked with investigating why almost a million people are neither working nor learning.
Alan Milburn told The Times that young people (Neet) who are not in employment, education or training are “not snowflakes”.
Instead, they were part of the “bedroom generation”, Mr Milburn said.
“They kind of live in their bedrooms; always working, never turning off.”
The former health minister warned that young people’s sleep patterns and concentration levels are being affected by social media, “and this is affecting their ability to work”.
He said: “People say this is a soft generation. My view is that it is absolutely not. It is an anxious generation.”
Mr Milburn’s interim report on young Neets is expected to be published next week.
The group of ten 12- and 13-year-olds who took part in the study each said they went to bed between midnight and 3 a.m. because they were scrolling on their phones, The Times reported.
The report is also expected to warn that the welfare state and the world of work are being built for a different generation.
Mr Milburn said British businesses also needed to adapt to providing “high levels of pastoral care for this group of young people experiencing mental distress”.
He added: “Employers have an easy time because they have been able to import bakery-ready migrant workers.
“He fell off the cliff.”
According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), an estimated 12.8% of all people aged 16 to 24 in the UK from October to December 2025 were Neet.
The total number of youths considered as Neet was 957,000.
A report published earlier this week also identified social media as a driver of a so-called quit culture among young people.
The research, based on interviews with more than 400 young people across the UK, found that some “enjoy the dopamine hit of a new job but then get bored very quickly and want to move on”.
It also found that “encouraging success online has led to a culture of quitting if things take time” and warned that schools were becoming a “Neet pipeline” where exam pressure “consumes much of secondary school” and there are no further or higher education opportunities beyond university education.
“The tragedy is that young people have so much potential, many of them do extraordinary things, but their lives are filled with too many obstacles, too much heartache, and too little action,” said Peter Hyman, co-author of Inside the Mind of a Young Neet.
MPs and colleagues discussed the harms of social media at length while considering the Welfare of Children and Schools Bill passed last month.
The government has received flexible legal powers to ban under-16s from accessing social media platforms deemed to be the most harmful, but could also impose curfews or scrolling restrictions on other websites.
A consultation meeting, titled Thriving in an Online World, to help the government decide what action to take, is open until Tuesday.
