Inside the hardest place to be young in England, where one in six under-25s are jobless

“These are the main barriers young people face in Middlesbrough : education, jobs and transport. Thank you, please let me know if you have any questions,” 18-year-old James says as he diligently folds up his pages of typed notes. His black shirt and trousers are immaculately pressed. Middlesbrough, which sits on the south bank of the River Tees and just a stone’s throw from the North York Moors, is one of the most deprived local authority areas in England.

Almost half of its 90 neighbourhoods fall within the nation’s top 10 per cent for deprivation. Spend a day here and you will see that Labour’s drive to reduce youth unemployment is not going to be straightforward or quick. Middlesbrough poses a serious question: how do you get young people into work in a place where there are few decent jobs and terrible transport links? You might be able get the best Chicken Parmo you’ll ever eat in this former industrial area, where Britain’s steel industry exploded and chemical manufacturing giant Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) once employed as many as 15,000 people in nearby Billingham, but, today, it is a terrible place to be young.

In fact, a recent report by the Children’s Commissioner Rachel d’Souza ranked it as the toughest place in England to grow up. Middlesbrough’s House of Fraser department store closed in 2022 and remains one of many shuttered premises on the high street (Photo: Daniel Harvey Gonzalez/In Pictures/Getty Images) 17 per cent of young people aged 16 to 25 years old are now Neet – not in education, employment or training. That is behind only Blackpool where 1 in 5 young people are above the national average of 13 per cent.

As Alan Milburn, Labour’s youth unemployment tsar – prepares for the imminent release of his much-anticipated report into the Neets crisis – Middlesbrough is exactly the sort of place he must address. Perhaps, even, rescue. The decline of industry and the high street Shuttered shops in the centre of town embody the end of a chain of economic problems and changing consumer habits which have resulted in the social and economic exclusion of youngsters in “Boro” – as it is affectionately called by some.

At Middlesbrough’s Job Centre, James has given me the kind of professional presentation you might expect from someone with years of experience, delivered unfalteringly to a room full of people staring at him – senior Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) work coaches, me (a journalist he’s never met before) and government representatives. James says many of his friends have had to leave Middlesbrough in order to find work (Photo: Dave Charnley/The i Paper) That is because James is an expert in his subject.

He grew up here and recently concluded his studies of Business Management and Administration at college. Despite applying for countless jobs, he was, until the DWP employed him to do work experience in poster design, himself a Neet. “Middlesbrough gets a lot of bad press,” James tells me, letting his frustration show for the first time. In August 2026, a spate of violent incidents made national headlines: one being a car crash that killed seven people, including three teenagers and two police officers, and subsequent disorder at a memorial for those who died.

Three of James’s friends recently moved to Liverpool to go to university. They now live a 2 hour and 40 minute drive away (on a good day) or a 3 hour train trip which costs at least £50. “They got jobs really quickly in Liverpool,” James says, “but that just can’t happen in Middlesbrough. Most of my friends who have stayed are unemployed. It feels like nobody can get a job at the minute and the ones that are coming up are cooking in hospitality or warehouse work.”

Middlesbrough has been branded the toughest place to grow up in England (Photo: Oli Scarff/Getty Images) James is currently participating in the Movement to Work scheme, which is offered by the Government as a way of breaking the cycle of young people needing experience in order to get jobs by offering them quality work experience, either within the civil service or with major employers like the National Grid and Tesco. Disappearing Saturday jobs and expensive taxis Nobody chooses where they are born.

Or when. Young people in Middlesbrough have entered the world to find the odds are stacked against them through no fault of their own. Jackie McNab is the DWP’s service leader for Cumbria and Tees Jobs and Career Service. She oversees 17 Job Centres across the area and has worked in the sector for over a decade. “We’ve got inner city problems but we don’t have the infrastructure of a city,” she explains. “Transport is a huge problem in this area.

Trains only run once an hour up to Newcastle and they get cancelled very frequently.” “The bus service isn’t supportive enough,” she adds. “We’ve had some successes with getting the likes of Amazon to put on a specific bus [for workers] but this is the biggest barrier we’re talking about to jobs – we don’t have the big employers that you might see in cities or the infrastructure to get people to them.” Nearby, Newcastle and Sunderland do at least have Metro services but Middlesbrough is cut off.

Adam Taylor, a specialist youth work coach, adds that “the last train back from Newcastle leaves at 10pm”, which is risky for any young person who takes up work there because it “usually gets cancelled” and taxis back “cost a bloody fortune”. Jackie and her team describe ICI closing its doors in nearby Billingham in 2008 as “an economic shock” to the area. Several people on Jackie’s team, including Adam, say their grandfathers worked at the site.

At its peak, ICI’s plant in Billingham employed around 15,000 people but thousands of jobs were lost before ICI ceased operations there in 2008 (Photo: Jamieson/Mirrorpix/Getty Images) But now with those industrial jobs and the disposable income they generated gone, shops are shuttered and, as a result, the entry level high street and retail jobs that young people used to do are gone too. This problem is not unique to Middlesbrough. A recent report from the Work Foundation at Lancaster University revealed there was one starter job for every three young people in the UK looking for work .

Neets are not a new phenomenon . The problem is that the number of 16 to 24-year olds who can be described this way has barely dipped much below 1 million for almost a quarter of a century. Milburn has described the situation as a “moral crisis” but, equally, he has made it clear that Britain can no longer afford its Neet population, which costs an annual £125bn. Shift from unemployment support to employment support But, as Middlesbrough shows, there is no one size fits all approach to youth employment and some parts of the country are deprived after years of decline and neglect.

James, and the young people like him across Tees Valley need jobs in order to become employed and transport so that they can get to and from them easily. Jackie and her team are already trying innovative things like connecting young people directly with local employers and running job fairs as a way of doing so. The DWP also runs a scheme called Connect to Work via the Job Centre which supports people with complex needs. And still, Middlesbrough’s high Neets rate persists.

Milburn has got his work cut out and it’s clear that change is going to take time and serious investment. Where that money will come from at a time of strained public finances is one of the biggest questions facing Andy Burnham ’s government.