Social media and the welfare state are pushing Britain towards an “economic catastrophe” over youth unemployment, a landmark government review has found.

Smartphones have “rewired” the brains of young adults and left them trapped in unemployment, former health secretary Alan Milburn has found in an official report commissioned by Sir Keir Starmer.

Labour ordered the review to uncover the reasons why 946,000 16 to 24-year-olds are out of education, employment and training. 

But the report’s findings are likely to pile pressure on Starmer’s government – or its successor under a new leader – to reform the welfare system to get more young people into work.

Youth ‘trapped in worklessness’

Milburn’s review will be published next week and it will declare that a “rising tide of mental ill-health, anxiety, depression [and] neurodiversity” is the main reason for youth joblessness, he told The Times.

While the former health secretary said these young people are “not snowflakes or faking it,” he said it is a “necessity” that the welfare state is reformed to get them into work.

“The system is trapping people in worklessness rather than enabling them into work. We’re at a risk of just writing a whole generation off,” he said.

The existing welfare system was built “for a different era and must change now if we are to avoid a generational, societal and economic catastrophe,” the report will say.

Milburn’s review included focus groups with what he calls the “bedroom generation,” who spend hours on their phones before bed and often live with their parents into adulthood.

Youth unemployment at 11-year high

“They are on all the time, they’re never off. [Social media] is leading to some evidence of functional impairment, changing their sleep patterns, concentration levels. That is having an impact on their ability to work,” Milburn said.

”[Young people] are different, not worse, not lazier, not less intelligent. They have grown up in a digital world that has rewired how they communicate, form relationships and manage stress,” the report will find.

The rate of youth unemployment reached 16.2 per cent in the three months to March, marking the highest level in 11 years.

Last year, the Prime Minister suffered a crushing defeat at the hand of his backbench MPs when he was forced to abandon a set of welfare reforms which he said would have stopped young people being “written off” work by the benefits system.