A million unemployed young people – what can the social housing sector do?

This is also not just a graduate problem. Graduate hiring fell 8% year-on-year in 2024-25, according to the Institute of Student Employers, and UK graduates are facing their toughest job market since 2018. But framing this as a graduate problem dangerously obscures what is happening further down the skills ladder, where the consequences are more severe and the safety net is scantier.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the accelerant that changes everything. Research by King’s College London, analysing millions of job postings and LinkedIn profiles from 2021 to 2025, found that firms most exposed to AI reduced junior positions by 5.8% – with the effect concentrated almost entirely at entry level. Adzuna has recorded a 30% drop in UK entry-level job postings since ChatGPT’s launch.

“The sector is not short of work. It is short of people to do the work, and NEETs are an untapped pipeline”

The British Chambers of Commerce warns that youth unemployment is forecast to reach 17% this year, and that AI will compound this further as automation replaces the routine tasks that have historically been the first rung on the ladder.

This is the landscape into which every school leaver, everyone fresh out of college, every young person not heading to university is now stepping. The challenge for the social housing sector is whether it contributes to the problem or becomes part of the solution.

Social housing is a substantial employer, considerably larger than many appreciate. Registered providers in England alone employed around 140,000 people, according to the most recent ONS figures, from 2017.

Taking into account local authority housing departments, ALMOs and landlords in the three devolved nations, the number of employees in social housing across the UK is likely to be closer to 200,000 today.

This is only part of the story. The Centre for Economics and Business Research’s 2024 report for Shelter and the National Housing Federation (NHF) calculated that building 90,000 social homes supports over 353,000 total jobs once supply chain and employee spending effects are counted.

For every job directly generated, a further 1.12 jobs are sustained in the wider economy. Maintenance contractors, retrofit specialists, materials suppliers, digital services firms: the sector’s spending ripples out across every region and every skill level.

The RSH forecasts that investment in existing homes will average £10.9bn per year for the next five years. This level of activity requires a pipeline of labour if the sector chooses to see it that way.

What makes social housing particularly attractive to young jobseekers at entry level is purpose, stability and opportunities across a range of roles.

These range from trades and repairs to tenancy management, income recovery, community development, digital services and finance – many requiring no degree and many offering apprenticeship routes and professional qualifications through the Chartered Institute of Housing.

Hays’ 2025 Salary and Recruiting Trends Guide found that 96% of organisations in the construction and property sectors reported skills shortages over the past year. The sector is not short of work. It is short of people to do the work, and NEETs are an untapped pipeline.

“[Hiring young people] means not just advertising vacancies, but building pipelines: partnering with schools and colleges, creating apprenticeships at scale, and embedding employment support for residents as a board-level commitment”

What has also changed is the degree to which housing providers are actively creating employment opportunities for their own residents, not simply managing homes around them.

The NHF, the National Federation of ALMOs (NFA) and Communities that Work jointly commissioned the Building Opportunity report from the Learning and Work Institute, which found that social housing landlords are a “strategic, effective and value-for-money route to improving the employability of many of those who face the biggest barriers to finding paid work”.

NHF chief executive Kate Henderson has also been clear that social housing providers are keen to work with government to support more people in developing skills and accessing job opportunities.

The NFA has been equally clear that ALMOs offer residents direct support with employability alongside financial well-being and health, often in partnership with health professionals, social care organisations and charities.

And the evidence is not just aspirational. Believe Housing’s 2024-25 social value report records 131 residents supported into secure, sustained employment in a single year, with hundreds more referred to specialist support. These are not peripheral activities. They are becoming central to what community-rooted landlords do – and the best of them are building it into their business plans, not treating it as a favour.

The NEET crisis is not abstract. It is playing out in your communities, on your estates, in the households of your residents and their families. The young person who cannot find a foothold in a narrowing entry-level labour market is, in many cases, your tenant’s child.

At a time when AI is closing doors across the private sector, the social housing sector has a genuine opportunity to open them – not to provide handouts, but out of strategic necessity and enlightened self-interest.

The sector faces significant skills shortages. It has significant capital to deploy. It has deep community roots. And it has a workforce pipeline sitting right outside its office windows.

That means not just advertising vacancies, but building pipelines: partnering with schools and colleges, creating apprenticeships at scale, and embedding employment support for residents as a board-level commitment rather than a discretionary extra.

It means using the sector’s procurement power – its £10bn annual spend on repairs and maintenance alone – to require supply chain partners to take on apprentices and local workers as a contractual condition.

The Milburn interim report, the ONS data and the King’s College research all point to the same conclusion: the structural barriers facing young people today are greater than they have been for generations, and the private sector’s push for more AI-enabled solutions is raising those barriers even higher.

The social housing sector cannot solve the NEET dilemma alone. But boards that choose to act rather than observe will not only serve their communities better, they will build stronger, more resilient organisations and communities in the process.

The question is not whether the sector can make a difference. It clearly can. The question is whether those in a position to make a difference will conclude it is their responsibility to do so.

David Levenson, founder, Coaching Futures