By Professor Peter Jones MBE
Hospitality does not just give young people jobs. It gives them confidence, communication, self-belief, and a reason to show up. If the Prime Minister wants ‘good growth in every postcode’, he needs to back every hospitality business in the country and stop the dismantling of the training system that makes them work.
Picture a 17-year-old who until three months ago had no job, no qualifications worth speaking of, and no particular reason to believe that anyone was going to invest in them.
They are in a kitchen team and by lunchtime, they will have prepared a crate of vegetables, restocked the cold store, learned how to hold a knife properly, and been told, possibly for the first time in their working life, that they did something well. They will come back tomorrow.
That scene plays out, in some version, in thousands of kitchens and restaurants and hotels across the United Kingdom every single day. It is not a charity programme. It is not a government initiative. It is the hospitality industry doing what it has always done, taking young people who have been left behind by other systems and giving them something that no classroom, no benefits and no well-meaning policy document has ever reliably provided, a reason to turn up, a skill to learn, a team to belong to, and the daily proof that they are capable of more than they thought.
Last Saturday, the Guardian’s editorial characterised our youth unemployment crisis with precision, too few jobs, in too many places.
More than one million 16 to 24-year-olds are now NEET, not in education, employment or training, the highest figure in over a decade.
The Milburn Review calls it a whole-system failure and prices it at £125 billion a year.
The Government’s current response, a ‘youth guarantee’ covering limited cohorts for limited periods, is, as the Guardian rightly notes, a gesture rather than a solution. What neither the editorial nor the policy fully grasp is that the solution is already there, distributed across every high street, every hotel, every catering kitchen in the country, waiting to be backed rather than bureaucratically undermined.
There is no Goldman Sachs in Grimsby. But there are hospitality businesses, and those businesses are a career ladder.
The hospitality industry is, structurally, one of the most powerful vehicles for social mobility this country possesses, and one of the least understood by those who design policy from behind a desk in Westminster.
It is a genuine meritocracy.
It exists in every postcode.
It does not matter where you went to school, what grades you got, or whether your parents had connections. It cares whether you can work, whether you can learn, and whether you are prepared to put in the effort. For the young person who has spent two years adrift, who the system has written off as a statistic, that is not a small thing.
That is an opportunity.
What hospitality gives young people is not just employment. It is a structure and a sense of self-worth. Consider what a young person develops in their first year in a professional kitchen or a front-of-house team.
They learn to communicate clearly under pressure to call out an order in a busy service, to handle a difficult customer with composure, to brief a colleague in the thirty seconds before service.
They develop punctuality, not because someone tells them it matters, but because the team falls apart without it and they experience that consequence directly. They build resilience: the ability to make a mistake, correct it, and move on without collapsing, because there is no time to collapse.
They learn to take instruction without resentment and to give it without arrogance, one of the most valuable professional skills in any field.
Hospitality does not just teach young people to cook or to serve. It teaches them who they can be.
And then there is the matter of confidence, which is, I would argue, the most significant gift the industry gives and the least visible to policymakers.
The young person who arrives at a kitchen as a kitchen porter, uncertain of their own worth, often carrying the weight of an education system that made them feel like a failure, is a different person twelve months later. They can look a customer in the eye. They can give a confident answer. They can walk into a room and know their role.
That transformation is not incidental to the hospitality experience. It is central to it. The daily discipline of service, of caring about someone else’s experience, of being accountable for your contribution to a team’s performance, builds a self-belief that no workshop on employability skills could ever reliably replicate.
This matters for the NEET debate because the young people most at risk of long-term NEET status are precisely those whose self-belief has been most damaged. Research consistently shows that the single greatest predictor of sustained NEET status is not lack of jobs or qualifications.
It is loss of confidence in one’s own employability. The young person who believes no employer would want them does not apply. The young person who has been told by the daily reality of a professional kitchen, that they have something to offer, does. Hospitality does not just provide an entry-level job. It restores the confidence the system has too often stripped away and creates a career based on individual effort and reward.
Which makes what the government is currently doing to the qualification infrastructure that supports this transformation more inexplicable.
Hospitality and catering has been excluded from the T Level programme, the flagship Level 3 qualification available to students in construction, digital, and healthcare, but not to those who want to build a career around food.
There will be no V Level for the sector at Level 3 either. The Professional Cookery and Hospitality diplomas that have trained generations of chefs and front-of-house professionals faced defunding from 2027, with no coherent successor in place.
The result is a growing gap between the college-based provision that reaches young people before they become NEET statistics, and the apprenticeship routes that require them to already be in employment.
The Netherlands has a NEET rate of 5.3%, against our 13.5%, achieved in part because a young person who wants to be a chef spends four days a week in a professional kitchen from the age of 16, backed by a nationally recognised qualification and an employer culture that treats that training as an investment rather than a burden. We are, right now, moving in precisely the opposite direction.
For every £1 spent on employment support for young people, £25 is spent on benefits. That is not a policy.
The Guardian’s editorial called for a ‘youth contract’ built around placements and apprenticeships in sectors like hospitality. I would go further. What is needed is not another programme layered on top of a broken system. It is the repair of the system itself: protecting existing cookery and hospitality qualifications until there is something better to replace them. Commissioning a proper employer-led review of post-16 provision before the 2027 cliff-edge arrives; introducing targeted employer incentives to make it financially neutral for small hospitality businesses to take on NEET young people; and reducing the administrative burden on those small businesses to make it possible.
Alongside that structural repair, government needs to do something it has consistently failed to do. Tell careers advisers, schools, parents, and young people themselves that hospitality is a career worth choosing.
Skilled, creative, progressive, international, financially viable, and available in their community. The sector that trains the country’s finest chefs, that runs its great hotels, that feeds its hospitals and schools and sporting venues, still suffers from a perception problem that no amount of television cookery programmes can correct.
Changing that perception is not a marketing exercise. It is a precondition of any serious NEET strategy.
The Prime Minister wants good growth in every postcode. So do we. Hospitality has been delivering exactly that, quietly and without recognition, for longer than most political careers. It trains young people, employs them locally, develops them as human beings, and gives them the skills and confidence to build a life. It does this in every town, every city, every community in the United Kingdom, not just the prosperous ones, not just the connected ones, but the ones that other sectors have long since left behind.
A very simple and compelling industry strategy is to back hospitality, back the kitchen. Back the college course that leads to it. Back the employer who takes a chance on someone no one else believed in. This is not complicated. It is just a matter of political will.
Peter Jones is a hospitality industry commentator and researcher. This article reflects his personal views.
