{"text":[[{"start":9.1,"text":"On September 18 Jake Boyes, a 20-year-old engineering apprentice, made a Facebook page about his hometown. It’s the kind of strained plea that you hear somewhere every day in Britain, a digital blip that briefly appears and then vanishes."}],[{"start":23.78,"text":"In a webcam video filmed in his bedroom and posted on the same day to his new page, Boyes said that Rotherham “really breaks my heart”. He said he just wanted to help people. Everyone in the town seemed to hate living there."}],[{"start":37.2,"text":"“If you search Rotherham on the internet it’s always negative,” he told me with some frustration when we met in late October. The town is notorious for its grooming gangs scandal, which has led to 15 years of cumulative reports, reviews, inquiries and investigations into child sexual exploitation in the area between 1997 and 2013."}],[{"start":60.4,"text":"Then in August 2025 the local steelworks was given a compulsory winding-up order, resulting in at least 1,300 workers being furloughed on reduced wages; yet another South Yorkshire story of industrial decline. Rotherham United, the town’s 101-year-old football club, has been relegated twice in the past four seasons."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":81.6,"text":"“There’s always something,” sighs Frankie Parker, a Mind counsellor who has spent the past 14 years working with children and young people here. Several of Britain’s most deprived neighbourhoods are within walking distance of her office in the town centre. The waiting list for private youth counselling at her clinic keeps growing."}],[{"start":99.56,"text":"Boyes spends a lot of his spare time after work on Facebook talking to local people, usually a lot older than him, about Rotherham’s pathologies. “They feel like it’s too late to do anything,” he says. Many were nostalgic for a drug-free, monolithically white town of brass bands and union jobs that no longer existed."}],[{"start":118.4,"text":"Walking past some of the remaining pubs on Friday and Saturday night, shouty cover versions of songs from other people’s teenage years echoed through Rotherham’s streets: the Bee Gees, Abba, Robbie Williams, Elton John, Queen. When I talked to baby boomers in the town, they fell back on a catch-all description for their home: “Shithole”."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":137.76,"text":"Young people often just get out, leaving to become students or to find work. Rotherham has a below-average number of 18 to 29-year-olds relative to its population. In September, a report published by the Institute for Public Policy Research found that the town has the fewest suitable entry-level jobs for young people in the country. Oliver Coppard, the mayor of South Yorkshire, said it was a “shocking statistic”."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":161.36,"text":"But was it? You can scan online for jobs in Rotherham and see the same sparse listings that teenagers, students and graduates see: delivery work, warehouses, care assistant roles, zero-hours contracts. Nor is the town’s experience a complete outlier. In June, the Work Foundation at Lancaster University found there was one starter job for every three young people seeking work in the UK."}],[{"start":184.64,"text":"Almost a million young people in Britain are “Neets” — not in education, employment or training. The proportion of 16 to 24-year-olds who fit this description has fallen below 10 per cent only once over the past quarter of a century."}],[{"start":197.56,"text":"Since Labour took office in 2024, Neets have risen up the political agenda. In November 2025, the former Labour health secretary Alan Milburn was asked to conduct a review of the evidence and formulate a policy response to find ways to get the young to work."}],[{"start":213.52,"text":"His interim report, released in May, estimated the annual cost of Neet young people at £125bn, more than the Treasury spends on education or defence."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":223.92,"text":"Neets were being brought out of the background of public life and established as another one of those peculiarly British disorders, connected to the welfare state, that called into question the long-term financial stability of the country. Between 2019 and 2024 the number of 16 to 24-year-olds receiving universal credit (or equivalent) while out of work rose by 24 per cent."}],[{"start":244.36,"text":"The language of Milburn’s report when it appeared earlier this year was thunderously ethical, even Calvinistic: “moral crisis”, “lost generation”, “self-respect”. In mid-October, Milburn met Andy Burnham. The prime minister came out of the meeting and suddenly sounded a lot like Milburn: “This is an economic catastrophe and a moral failure.”"}],[{"start":267.52,"text":"Now new ways to lever young people into employment must be found. But Milburn and Burnham have offered less analysis of the causes of this crisis than the consequences, and setting out the problem is not the same thing as solving it. “There have been surprisingly few attempts at overarching analyses of what has gone wrong with young people,” the sociologist William Davies wrote in August."}],[{"start":289.92,"text":"What does it feel like to be caught up in an “economic catastrophe”, or the product of a “moral failure”? I wanted to know what it felt like to be a Neet, a near-Neet or surrounded by Neets. Particularly now that the adult and official worlds of politics, budgets, welfare and the press were putting them under the microscope, attempting to pull them into the labour market and mapping out their futures."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":311,"text":"Over four days I interviewed young people and agency workers responsible for them in Rotherham. My subjects — Boyes, Kara Jones, Fatima Mohammed and Elian Bamford — sat for hours of in-depth interviews. The youngest was 20 and the oldest was 23."}],[{"start":327.24,"text":"They sounded like underdogs sometimes. They felt that it wasn’t ideal being born in Rotherham, or moving there early in life as Mohammed had. “It’s really like a lottery,” said Boyes when I asked him what it was like to grow up in the town. He saw supposed opportunities in work and life, then dismissed them. They were out of reach for someone like him. “It’s not the real world. It’s only for the 1 per cent.”"}],[{"start":349.72,"text":"History does not record the identity of Britain’s first Neet. Unofficially and spiritually, the title belongs to Steven Patrick Morrissey, the lead singer of The Smiths. On March 22 1985, the BBC broadcast a documentary that showed Morrissey picking through his hometown, Manchester. In a voiceover, he narrates years of awful nothingness and drift spent in his mother’s council house on the Kings Road in Stretford during the 1970s: “I never had a social life. I never left the house. I just simply sat in and read and watched television and done [sic] all the things that in life are generally considered to be quite negative and quite soul-destroying.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":391.28,"text":"Morrissey rose out of Neet-hood, dabbling in music journalism before making it as an indie singer. By the time The Smiths gained national prominence in the mid-1980s, youth unemployment was emerging as a policy problem for Margaret Thatcher’s government."}],[{"start":406.56,"text":"Its response, alongside employment secretary Norman Tebbit’s recollections of an unemployed father who “got on his bike” to look for work, was the 1986 Social Security Act. If young people wanted income support from the state, they would have to enrol in a youth training scheme. Three years later Morrissey sang chirpily about “a government scheme / Designed to kill your dream”."}],[{"start":428,"text":"The term Neet was coined by an anonymous senior Home Office civil servant in 1996. In the decades since, it has become a permanent part of policymaking discourse and a widely used international measure."}],[{"start":440.64,"text":"Britain’s Neet rate used to be around the EU average. Last year, only Romania had more Neets than Britain. And Neets have changed in the opening decades of this century. Fewer of them today have experienced employment before and fewer of them are looking for work. Nearly half of Neets in 2024-25 recorded having a disability, a number that has doubled since 2013-14."}],[{"start":464,"text":"Seven in 10 young people claiming a health and disability benefit are still claiming it a decade later, says Angela Carter, an occupational psychologist. “Successive cohorts of young people are doing worse than their predecessors.”"}],[{"start":476.6,"text":"The majority of Neets are not simply unemployed. They are economically “inactive”. No longer looking for work, they have, in effect, frozen into doing nothing then disappeared from institutional oversight. They’re not even bothering to game the benefits system. Milburn reported that in England alone in 2023-24, “around 314,000 18 to 24-year-olds were neither in work nor in education and are not themselves receiving benefits”."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":506.92,"text":"My subjects in Rotherham often linked inactivity to phones. They described friends as “rotting”. These were people their age who had tried and failed to get jobs, then given up."}],[{"start":517.84,"text":"“What really struck me was how many had gradually lost confidence in themselves,” says Shuab Gamote, a policy adviser who has interviewed hundreds of Neets in the past two years. “In some cases [they] had almost slipped into a state of helplessness. We started calling this the rejection economy, where young people are constantly being told what they can’t do rather than what they can.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":539.32,"text":"Rates of anxiety, suicidal thoughts and depression among young people have consistently risen since 2010. It’s not a matter of self-diagnosis leading to higher reported symptoms of distress. “Self-identification and reported professional diagnosis all indicate that emotional difficulties and psychological distress have increased,” reported the psychoanalyst Peter Fonagy in March."}],[{"start":562.48,"text":"Fonagy had been asked to conduct a review of mental health and neurodevelopmental diagnoses by then health secretary Wes Streeting in December 2025. Fonagy’s interim findings spelled out something that was increasingly obvious: this is the most miserable generation of young British people on record."}],[{"start":580.8,"text":"The Rotherham interviewees described close friends and partners in the rejection economy who stopped looking for work and fell into a sleepless, parallel digital world. Their primary conduit to the outside reality was their social feeds."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":594.28,"text":"It began during the pandemic, said Mohammed. “If that hadn’t happened we would all be different people.” Young people had spent “so much time in their own heads” during the successive lockdowns; it was a “fearful” time. “Covid made us introverted. We have to really think about everything before we do it.”"}],[{"start":611.6,"text":"“Social media is inherently anti-human,” said Jones. “It’s hateful and spiteful.” She’s 21, works in a restaurant chain, studies in Sheffield, identifies as a woman and wants to be an actress. Her boyfriend was out of work for three years. “He found comfort in Twitch and live streams, in the idea of being able to sit and do nothing.”"}],[{"start":634.36,"text":"“I didn’t have a handheld device until I was nine, which is late by the standards of people I know,” Jones said. Bamford successively stripped social media apps from her phone once she realised her screen time had reached 12 hours a day. Boyes says he finds himself begging friends who are “in bed all day” to “just go for a walk”."}],[{"start":654.16,"text":"All strongly associated the digital world with mental health problems. Yet, whenever there had been a period in their lives when they needed to find work, they were given one message. “Go online, go online, go online,” explained Boyes. He once tried handing out a physical CV to retailers around Rotherham."}],[{"start":672.48,"text":"“They told me to go online.”"}],[{"start":675.08,"text":"On a sodden afternoon in October, Rotherham United played Shrewsbury Town at home. I watched from the stands as the hosts threw away a two-goal lead in a game that finished 3-3. Even by the standards of League Two, the gallows humour was relentlessly downbeat."}],[{"start":691.04,"text":"When Shrewsbury’s George Lloyd suffered a serious neck injury, the old Rotherhamites around me began muttering darkly about the town’s A&E: “Don’t take him there. He’ll never get out again.”"}],[{"start":701.96,"text":"Throughout the game, Shrewsbury’s fans sang about Rotherham being a “town full of paedos”. It happens every time United play at home."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":709.8,"text":"“Positive messages aren’t permeating outside of Rotherham. I’m going to be blunt here,” Dan Wilson, chief executive of Rotherham United Community Trust, told me when I met him and his colleagues to discuss their youth employability scheme. He pointed out that Rotherham council’s children and young people’s services were rated outstanding overall by Ofsted in December 2025."}],[{"start":731.6,"text":"“When you get away fans coming to the ground [singing] ‘just a town full of paedos’ . . . that’s all people associate with the borough.”"}],[{"start":738.56,"text":"In a 2015 review of the council, lead inspector Louise Casey found that council staff lacked the confidence to tackle grooming gangs due to “fear of being seen as racist”, inadvertently fuelling “the far right and allowing racial tensions to grow”. The majority of the men who perpetrated the abuse were of Pakistani heritage. Amid nationwide rioting in the summer of 2024, a Holiday Inn housing asylum seekers six miles from Rotherham was attacked by a mob."}],[{"start":765.2,"text":"What was it like to grow up here under that shadow? Jones told me her father was a skinhead and not easy for her to get along with. To get away, she moved in with her grandmother near a retail park on the eastern fringe of Rotherham. She thought the town was “really racist, transphobic and sexist”. Customers at the restaurant called her a “trannie”. “Verbal abuse in general is really high.” She planned to leave Rotherham for good as soon as she could."}],[{"start":789.32,"text":"On September 30, Boyes, who has aspirations to enter local politics, posted a picture of himself with the Rotherham mayor, Haroon Rashid, on his Facebook page. It prompted a welter of angry comments, some of which were racist. He was annoyed, too, by the prying out-of-town YouTubers who come to Rotherham and make confrontation-seeking videos with titles such as “This Town is Everything Wrong with Britain” and “Rotherham: Worst Place in England, For a Very Dark Reason”."}],[{"start":816.16,"text":"Boyes knew the town had problems. He knew it was hard to find work. He scraped into an apprenticeship earlier this year. But he didn’t want to leave what he thought of as “his” town."}],[{"start":827.16,"text":"Both Mohammed and Bamford were slowly realising they might have to go back to London in search of work. They were relatively recent graduates from London universities. Mohammed was unemployed for a while, then entered a master’s programme."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":841.76,"text":"Bamford has now been unemployed for six months. She studied interior design at the University of the Arts in London. She had applied for a hundred positions, first in design, then anything she could find. Nothing happened. She graduated last year. Two people she knows out of the 150 on their course have found jobs since it finished."}],[{"start":863.04,"text":"“My world used to be so big. Now it’s so small. First you lose hope, then you abandon it.”"}],[{"start":870.44,"text":"One night after she finished her shift at the chain restaurant, Jones met me for a walk around Parkgate. The retail complex opened in 1987, built on reclaimed land that was once the site of an iron and steel works. Its location, a short drive from Rotherham town centre, is blamed by residents for gutting retail there. Over the decades the big brands — Marks and Spencer, Primark — all made the journey from town to Parkgate."}],[{"start":896.44,"text":"Jones looked around the empty car park. It was dead quiet and dead cold. Storm Boelo whipped around us. Litter skated over the concrete. She was adamant about Rotherham. She was going to get out for good. She wasn’t going to give up and rot in bed. She was determined to be an artist."}],[{"start":913.42,"text":"What Jones wanted was for her aspiration to be rewarded. She was no different in that sense from the older people in the town when they were her age, the ones who had lost hope and turned inwards after life disappointed them."}],[{"start":925.94,"text":"Like Boyes and Bamford, she felt as if the systems and institutions that were supposed to support her no longer worked. All the young people I spoke to in Rotherham believed that they had been failed by the adult world of agencies, education and employment. They were struggling to launch themselves into real life."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":943.76,"text":"“One of the things we found was that too many young people had experienced what I would describe as taught helplessness,” says Gabote. “We have built something resembling a game of snakes and ladders, except there are far too many snakes and not nearly enough ladders.”"}],[{"start":959.2,"text":"Milburn is expected to deliver his full report into Neets in mid-November. Burnham has linked future measures to support Neets to his devolution agenda and expressed a desire to get employers and schools to facilitate more work experience for children. The deeper question — how was Britain left with so many lost, anxious, purposeless young people? — looks like it will go unanswered."}],[{"start":982.12,"text":"Jones pointed to the flashing neon display of a knockdown-price furniture retailer. The home she shared with her grandmother was a 45-minute walk down the road. The neon went on changing through the night. She watched the colours from her window. Sometimes she couldn’t see the stars."}],[{"start":999.04,"text":"Will Lloyd is senior writer, FT Weekend. Photographs for the FT by Harry Mitchell"}],[{"start":1005.04,"text":"Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning"}],[{"start":1019.64,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1793497190_3796.mp3"}