LONDON — Britain is weighing restrictions on youth sickness and disability benefits to fund back-to-work programmes for the nearly one million young people who are not in work, education or training, Reuters reported on Friday.

Britain had 981,000 people aged 16 to 24 not in employment, education or training — known as NEETs — in the second quarter of this year, accounting for 13% of the age group and the second-highest share in Europe last year.

The youth unemployment rate stands at 15.6%, unusually high compared with 3.4% for older workers. Elsewhere in Europe, the youth jobless rate is typically only just over double that of older age groups.

Former minister Alan Milburn, a party ally of Prime Minister Andy Burnham, warned in May of a "lost generation" in the first part of his report into youth unemployment. Next week he will propose barring under-25s from ill-health supplements to standard unemployment benefits and moving them to a more restricted version of the main disability benefit.

"I'm not saying that any of this will be easy, or that it will be pain-free," Milburn told the Times. "Candidly, it could mean that some people will get less financial support."

Milburn said earlier this year he wanted to shift the 25-to-1 ratio of spending on benefits versus employment support more towards the latter, drawing lessons from the Netherlands and elsewhere. But his report is unlikely to rapidly reduce the £8 billion ($11 billion) a year spent on benefits for young people.

The cuts are also likely to be unpopular among many lawmakers in the governing Labour Party, who thwarted attempts by former prime minister Keir Starmer to cut welfare, handing ammunition to opposition parties who accuse the governing party of favouring welfare recipients over workers.

Faisa Omar, who applied for more than 500 jobs and got nowhere — a slog she likened to "shouting into the void" — found work within a month after a 10-week green-energy training course run by the employment charity Generation. Around 70% of people on Generation's courses found a job within 12 months, double the average for similar programmes, its UK head Michael Houlihan said.

Artificial intelligence has also reduced client demand for junior staff, according to James Tuttiett, an executive at IT consultancy FDM Group, which now has to train recruits for longer before hiring them out. "You have this silent hiring freeze where AI can increasingly do a lot of jobs that exist in white-collar work," he said, adding that a higher minimum wage and increased employer social security payments had also limited hiring.

Nye Cominetti, an economist at the left-leaning Resolution Foundation think tank, said Britain's welfare benefits were not unusually generous compared with European countries with lower NEET rates, but young people receiving health-related benefits in Britain faced fewer requirements to engage with getting back to work. The Netherlands, where only 5.6% of young people are NEETs, sends officials to knock on doors and offer help such as childcare or mental health support, and two-thirds of 16- to 17-year-olds there have part-time jobs, compared with less than a fifth in Britain.