The government has spent three years building policy infrastructure around one youth unemployment statistic. This week, a UK charity coalition served notice that a comparable workforce crisis has been growing quietly at the other end of the age spectrum, and it has assembled the tracking data to prove it.
A Second Population “Locked Out of Work”
On September 7, the Centre for Ageing Better, working with Age UK, Learning and Work Institute and Hospitality UK, launched a new labour market metric called NETER, meaning not in education, training, employment or retirement. It covers people aged between 50 and state pension age. According to the charity’s own analysis of the Office for National Statistics Labour Force Survey, 21% of that group is currently NETER, compared with 13% of the 16 to 24 year old population classified as NEET (not in education, employment or training). The NETER figure stands at 2.9 million people for 2025, and 918,000 of that group were interested in or actively seeking work between October and December 2025, a 22% rise from two years earlier.
The charity is not arguing that youth unemployment support should shrink. It wants government to add a second, equally resourced track. As the Centre for Ageing Better’s own release explains, government funding pledges to move young people into work over the past decade run to roughly ten times the sum committed to the 50-plus group, even as the broader labour market shows only uneven signs of recovery on both sides of the Atlantic.
Why NEET Became a Policy Lever
The comparison to NEET is not incidental. The charity’s own release notes that the number of NEETs interested in or actively seeking work grew from 504,000 at the end of 2023 to 660,000 at the end of 2025, a 31% increase, and that trajectory is what compelled last year’s Budget to commit 820 million pounds in funding. NETER’s backers are explicitly trying to replicate that arc: publish a comparable figure on a regular schedule, let journalists and MPs reference it the way they reference the NEET rate, and use repetition to manufacture the same political urgency. Whether that works depends less on the size of the number than on whether newsrooms keep returning to it, which is exactly what this week’s scattered framing calls into question.
What Three Outlets Chose to Emphasize
The same release produced three visibly different stories within hours of each other, and the gaps between them say almost as much as the underlying data.
Personnel Today framed it as a straightforward labour market and HR policy story. It walked through the NETER breakdown in detail, that 55% of NETERs cite long-term illness or disability, 17% cite caring responsibilities, and 11% are unemployed and actively looking, treating the release largely as source material for HR practitioners without added commentary.
LBC took a different route, opening with the youth NEET crisis and citing the first Alan Milburn NEET Report’s forecast that the youth NEET rate could climb past 16% within five years, then folding the NETER figures in as a comparison point. Its account reads as a youth unemployment story that discovered a second crisis mid write, not the other way round.
GB News went further still, headlining its account “Labour urged to tackle over-50s jobs crisis” and building the entire piece around government accountability, that ministers are overlooking older workers while funding youth programs at ten times the level. Neither Personnel Today nor LBC assigned blame to the sitting government in comparable terms; GB News constructed its whole account around that frame.
On the numbers themselves, the three accounts do not disagree. The 21% versus 13% split, the 2.9 million NETER figure, and the roughly tenfold funding gap appear consistently across all three. Where they diverge is entirely in framing: a workforce-practice story, a youth unemployment story with an older worker footnote, and a partisan accountability story. That the same press release can be read three such different ways is itself worth noting. It suggests NETER has not yet settled into a fixed news category the way NEET has, and how it gets framed over the next few months will likely shape whether it becomes a genuine policy lever or a one cycle news item.
The Angle All Three Missed
None of the three accounts built on the line in the charity’s own quote that HR technology leaders should care about most. Dr Andrea Barry, Deputy Director for Work, Transitions, and Retirement at the Centre for Ageing Better, said NEETs and NETERs “are both groups whose capabilities are questioned or underestimated based on unfounded assumptions about their age,” adding that “they are two groups who potentially face the most amount of uncertainty and threat in the workplace from the rise of AI.”
That sentence appeared in the release and was quoted in part by GB News, but none of the three outlets did anything with it. For an HR technology audience, it is the more consequential claim. If AI-driven hiring and workforce tools are already under scrutiny for how they screen older candidates, and a national data set is about to start tracking worklessness in that same population at scale, HR and talent-acquisition functions are being handed both the exposure and the measurement stick in the same week.
What This Means for the HR Leader
Three practical implications follow from a metric the government has not yet adopted, but that a four-organization coalition is now actively pushing it toward.
Sourcing and pipeline data get a second yardstick
If NETER becomes a published government indicator the way NEET is, expect the same trajectory: media coverage, targeted funding, and eventually pressure on large employers to show what they are doing about it. This lands against a backdrop where senior job seekers are already downleveling to get hired, evidence that age-related pipeline friction is not a policy abstraction but a live hiring problem. HR platforms that already report on age diversity in hiring pipelines have a head start; those that do not track candidate age bands at all, often for legitimate anti-discrimination reasons, will need a plan for how to demonstrate progress without collecting data they should not be collecting.
The caring-responsibilities slice is the fastest-moving lever
Seventeen percent of NETERs, around 490,000 people, cite caring responsibilities, and the charity’s own breakdown shows 78% of that group are women. A further 55% of NETERs, around 1.6 million people, cite long-term illness or disability, with 22.5% of that group interested in or looking for work despite the barrier. Flexible work policies, phased return programs, and caregiver leave are not just retention tools for younger parents. The data says they are directly relevant to a much larger, older cohort that current people-analytics dashboards rarely segment by age, and the gender split means a caring-responsibilities policy gap will show up first in the women who make up the bulk of that 490,000.
Watch the employer pledge, not just the headline metric
The Centre for Ageing Better already runs an employer-facing accreditation scheme, the Age-friendly Employer Pledge. If NETER gains the political traction NEET has, that pledge, not a new law, is the most likely near-term channel through which employers will be asked to respond. HR and communications teams should know now whether their organization is signed up, and if not, why not.
The Bottom Line
The story the press ran this week was about a charity asking government to count something it currently does not count. The story HR leaders should actually be tracking is what happens once that counting starts: a new, comparably sized workforce population entering the same kind of policy spotlight that reshaped youth hiring programs over the last three years, at the exact moment AI is reshaping how all of that population gets hired, retained, or let go.
Source: Centre for Ageing Better
