More than 10 years ago, the Home Office showed interest in trying to map this relationship by doing a retrospective study of Neet status and criminality. The plan was to have a sample of 18-year-olds register offending behaviour week by week over the previous two years and to consider this against their engagement in education, training or employment. I pointed out that some of the most important members of any such sample were unlikely to remember much in any detail beyond the previous couple of weeks. A pilot was commissioned, but abandoned soon afterwards for precisely these reasons.
If one-fifth of our youth population is hanging around doing very little - a figure very similar to that suggested when Neets were "discovered" in 1993 - then we should be deeply concerned, both for their futures and for the cohesion of our society. The raft of policies - which are security measures - directed towards Neets for more than a decade seem to have made little difference.
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