US Edition
The number of young men out of work and education is rising at the fastest rate on record, according to the Office for National Statistics.
An extra 56,000 men aged 16 to 24 were not in education, work or training in the three months to June, the largest quarterly rise since records began in 2001.
This brings the total of young men in this group to 237,000, compared with just 90,000 women.
It comes as separate figures from the Department for Work and Pensions showed the number of foreign nationals registering for a British national insurance number reached a record high of 1.1 million in the year to June.
The surge was overwhelmingly driven by people from outside the European Union, with the most common nationalities being Indian and Nigerian.
The large uptick in applications comes as net immigration figures hit a record 606,000 in 2022, despite pledges by successive Conservative governments to bring down numbers.
Meanwhile, figures from the ONS showed that nearly 800,000 people aged 16 to 24 were out of education, employment and training from April to June – equivalent to 11.6pc.
This is 0.3 percentage points up from the first three months of the year, a rise driven entirely by young men, according to the ONS.
Tony Wilson, of the Institute for Employment Studies, said the large increase was driven in part by 18 to 20-year-olds who had their education interrupted by Covid.
He said: “[It] could be that they don’t want to stay in education because their experiences over the last few years may not have been positive.”
He added that this group will have lost out on things like career support, work placements and extracurricular activities leaving them less prepared for getting a job.
Similarly, there was also an increase in unemployment among 23 and 24-year-olds whose university experience was disrupted by lockdowns.
Some 467,000 16 to 24-year-olds were classed as economically inactive and outside training and education, while 327,000 were looking for work.
The increase coincides with a sharp rise in poor mental health among young people and comes amid a wider uptick in inactivity across the population since the pandemic.
Research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies earlier this week showed that more than one in four 16-year-old girls are in contact with NHS mental health services, nearly twice as many as before Covid.