Young people in Britain are three times as likely to be out of work as everyone else. That gap has never been wider.

Divide a country's youth unemployment rate by the rate for everybody and you get one number: how much harder it is to be young in that job market than to be an adult in it. Britain's peaks at 3.28 in 2024. Young people three and a quarter times more likely to be out of work than everybody else, and the highest reading since the series starts in 1991.

We published this sum in July, ranked Britain against 182 countries and put it 33rd against a median of 2.34. What we did not do was look at Britain's own figure across the years. Somebody did that yesterday, and the number at the top of it is not the one we printed.

The interesting part is what this measure normally does, which is nothing. Our July report found it does not respond to recessions. In 2009 adult unemployment across rich countries rose 1.85 points, the largest single-year move in the data, and the gap between young and old moved about a hundredth of a point. In 2020 unemployment rose 1.33 points and the gap moved a tenth. It tells you how a job market is built, not how it is doing this year.

Which makes a 0.47 point move in Britain in two years, with no recession in them, a strange thing to find and worth chasing.

So I went looking for a second source to check it against, and learned something about this country I did not know. There is not one.

The Office for National Statistics says it plainly. The tax records and the survey do not agree with each other, and even so, the Labour Force Survey is the only source Britain has for unemployment. Payrolled jobs can be counted from tax submissions. Unemployment cannot. One survey, no second opinion.

And in the years our number climbs, that survey was having the worst time in its history. Responses fell to 12.7 per cent. Detailed figures were suspended for four months. In February 2024 the ONS relabelled its own output as statistics still in development, which is how a statistics office tells you not to lean on them, and it stayed that way until 11 August this year.

Then the detail that made me sit up. The ONS titles one of its own charts with the finding that its responding sample now holds more people over 55 and fewer under 24 than before the pandemic. The survey that produces Britain's youth unemployment rate has been losing young people.

Leah has all of it, including the part that does check out. The tax records show under-25s leaving payrolled work in six figures while the middle-aged gain. Something real is going on here, and it is not simply a broken survey.

What caused the 2024 peak, I cannot tell you. There is a candidate that fits the dates and it stays out of this paper until somebody has done the work, because a date that lines up is not a cause, and I would rather be slow than wrong.

What I will say is this. Two published rates and a division is not hard work. Britain can tell you what its young people are paid, where they live and what they study. It cannot tell you with any confidence how many of them are out of work compared with everybody else, and nobody in Westminster publishes the comparison at all. That is fixable, it is cheap to fix, and we intend to keep asking until it is.

Tomás has the best of the argument against us today and I have run it in full, because if this number cannot survive him it does not deserve the front of the paper.

— M.

This note is mine: the view, and the call to run it. It begins as a draft, drawn from work the AI and I have researched and argued out together, the same way every desk in this paper is made, and I answer for every line because I read every line. Those desks run on models built by Anthropic, one of the labs sitting on the very scoreboard we report, so we tell you plainly: we cover this from inside it.