Impetus' reaction to Chancellor's autumn Budget 2025

The Chancellor Rt Hon Rachel Reaves delivered the autumn budget this afternoon. We’re pleased to hear confirmed:

🔶 £820m towards a Youth Guarantee, specifically for a work placement to young people aged 18-21 who have been on Universal Credit for 18 months.

The Youth Employment Group (of which we are co-chairs alongside Institute for Employment Studies, Learning and Work Institute, King's Trust, Youth Employment UK and Youth Futures Foundation) has been involved behind the scenes in shaping this.

The funding will cover both employment costs and wraparound support, which these young people will desperately need to get into sustained employment. The Guarantee will create around 80,000 jobs for long-term NEETs, around 20,000 of which will likely be from disadvantaged backgrounds. A great win for us!

🔶 Scrapping of the two-child limit on benefits, the measure that will lift the largest number of young people out of poverty.

Our CEO Susannah Hardyman MBE signed Child Poverty Action Group’s open letter earlier this month calling for Government to fully scrap the two-child limit: schools are often left picking up the pieces when increasingly more families fall further into poverty. We hope this change will alleviate some pressures in the system.

On the budget, our CEO Susannah said:

The Government’s continued focus on youth unemployment will be vital to achieving their growth agenda, while also transforming the lives of young people across Britain. There can be no sustainable growth so long as nearly a million young people are not in education, employment, or training (NEET) – a post-pandemic surge that has cost the economy £20bn in lost GDP. The Youth Guarantee is a critical opportunity to tackle this, and we’re pleased to see the addition of over £800 million for a subsidised work placement, including employment costs and additional wraparound support.

But to truly unlock universal opportunity, the Government must move beyond piecemeal changes into a holistic strategy. Lifting the two child-benefit cap is an important part of this, as socioeconomic background is strongly associated with employment status – young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are twice as likely to be NEET.

Ultimately, these announcements must be matched by meaningful investment in our schools, where the road to becoming NEET often begins, and by expanding the Youth Guarantee to offer tailored employment support until age 24.