The Costs of Doing Nothing
Britain’s creative industries generate £124 billion a year. Youth disengagement costs an estimated £125 billion. What might happen if we invested earlier?
Two figures caught my eye recently, and the closeness between them is worth pausing on: the creative industries contribute somewhere in the region of £124 billion a year to the UK economy. The estimated annual economic and social cost of NEETs — young people not in education, employment or training — is put at around £125 billion a year.
Apples and pears, certainly. But strikingly similar apples and pears.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) defines the creative industries as:
“…those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property.”
They encompass nine sub-sectors: advertising and marketing; architecture; crafts; design and designer fashion; film, TV, radio and photography; museums, galleries and libraries; music, performing and visual arts; publishing; and IT, software and computer services, including video games.
£124 billion versus £125 billion
The most recent official figures show that the creative industries contributed £124 billion in gross value added (GVA) to the UK economy in 2023 — equivalent to 5.2% of the whole UK economy. The sector supported around 2.4 million jobs, roughly 7% of UK employment.
Government has identified the creative industries as one of eight “growth-driving” sectors in its industrial strategy, alongside advanced manufacturing, clean energy, defence, digital technologies, financial services, life sciences, and professional and business services.
As the government itself put it in the foreword to its 2023 Creative Industries Sector Vision:
“Our creative industries are world-leading, an engine of our economic growth and at the heart of our increasingly digital world. From 2010 to 2019 they grew more than one and a half times faster than the wider economy and in 2021 they generated £108bn in economic value. In 2021, they employed 2.3 million people, a 49% increase since 2011.”
A November 2023 report for government by McKinsey & Company, The Arts in the UK: Seeing the Big Picture, described the UK as a “cultural powerhouse”, finding that 91% of UK adults had engaged with the arts in the previous 12 months.
Now put beside that another figure.
The Milburn Review — the government’s independent review into the youth NEET rate, published in May 2026 — estimated the cumulative annual economic and social cost of almost one million NEET young people at £125 billion a year.
It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to notice how close these two figures are: a sector the government itself calls one of Britain’s growth engines, and the annual cost of young people the system has failed to prepare adequately for education and work, sit within a billion pounds of one another.
Of course, the figures measure entirely different things. The £125 billion is not simply a welfare bill: it encompasses the much wider economic and social consequences of youth disengagement, including lost output and earnings, reduced wellbeing and costs to the public finances. But that hardly makes the figure less alarming.
For another sense of scale, the creative-industry tax reliefs announced in the Autumn Budget were valued at £15 billion over five years — an average of around £3 billion a year.
And NEETs are not the full story. Separately, nearly 700,000 graduates were reported at the beginning of 2026 to be out of work and claiming benefits, only some of whom would be captured by the NEET figures. The waste is not just fiscal. It is human.
At Cotswolds Arts Through Schools we see the other side of that equation every week: children discovering that they can draw, perform, compose, dance, design or make something they had no idea they were capable of.
Not every one of those children will work in the creative industries — nor should they. But every one of them is developing skills and confidence that will travel with them wherever they go.
Growth needs a pipeline
The government’s own industrial strategy is explicit about where it wants the creative sector to go:
“To enable growth in the sector, the government will leverage UK creative industries’ global comparative advantages by unlocking private investment, boosting exports, and developing its highly skilled workforce. […] The sector plays an important role in driving growth across regions and nations, through creative clusters and corridors across the country that spread opportunity and prosperity in communities.”
But growth needs a pipeline, and the pipeline starts in primary school.
Only 6% of state primary teachers currently report 2.5 hours or more of arts provision a week, compared with 47% of teachers in the independent sector, according to the Cultural Learning Alliance’s Report Card 2026.
Some 93.7% of English children are state-educated.
Put those two facts together and the scale of the problem is obvious: the overwhelming majority of children are being given a fraction of the creative grounding available to their independently educated peers — in exactly the sector the government says it wants Britain to lead.
The arts entitlement gap
The tragedy of all this is that it would cost comparatively little to begin doing something about it. Nobody appears to have a precise, reliable figure for how much is currently spent specifically on arts education in state primary schools. But we do know that access has declined sharply and that the divide between state and independent provision is substantial.
Suppose government found an additional £150 million, ring-fenced for primary school arts education. That would amount to roughly £30 per child — similar to what CATS already spends in its own partner schools. We don’t pretend that is adequate. We believe music education in particular needs a considerably higher level of investment, and we are working to increase our own spending towards £50 per child.
But £150–200 million would transform the scale of creative opportunity available in state primary schools. And £150 million is equivalent to only around 5% of the average annual value of the £15 billion in creative-industry tax reliefs announced over five years. Set it against the estimated £125 billion annual economic and social cost associated with young people being NEET and it becomes smaller still.
Think what even 1% of that £125 billion — £1.25 billion! — could do if invested earlier in children’s lives… It could transform the scale and quality of creative opportunity available in state schools while developing precisely the confidence, communication, creativity, collaboration and broader skills that employers increasingly say they need.
What would £150 million buy?
At CATS, we already know what relatively modest sums can achieve.
They can put professional artists into primary schools. They can give children access to music and instruments. They can bring dance, drama, opera and performance into schools where such opportunities might otherwise simply not exist. They can train teachers, replenish empty art cupboards and enable children to visit theatres, galleries and performances. Most importantly, they can give children the chance to discover something at which they are good. That matters whether that child eventually becomes a designer, musician, engineer, programmer, teacher, architect, filmmaker or accountant.
It is reasonable to assume that many of tomorrow’s workers in the creative industries — and in engineering and technology sectors increasingly interested in the creativity, problem-solving and adaptability of their future workforce — will need meaningful creative experiences during their education. For too many children, those experiences are currently limited.
If Britain’s creative sector is to continue leading the world, and if children are to grow up capable in visual arts, music, computing, games design, engineering and industries we have not yet invented, the investment has to start early.
The government has identified the creative industries as a growth engine. It has recognised that Britain needs a highly skilled workforce. It knows that nearly a million young people are already outside education, employment or training, at an estimated annual economic and social cost of £125 billion. And yet the creative opportunities available to children in state primary schools remain profoundly unequal.
The two figures I started with — £124 billion and £125 billion — are not directly comparable. They don’t prove that spending more on arts education would somehow make the NEET problem disappear. But they do tell us something important about our priorities.
We know the enormous economic value of creativity, we know the enormous economic and human cost when young people become disengaged, and we know that the foundations of confidence, curiosity, creativity and aspiration are laid long before a young person fills in their first job application.
Current policy risks undermining the very pipeline the government’s own growth strategy depends upon.
Doing something would cost money.
Doing nothing already costs us a fortune.
Christopher Stockwell
Trustee, Cotswolds Arts Through Schools
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