Labour are losing the young – here’s how Burnham can win them back

By July 2026, the Greens were on 39% among 18-to-24-year-olds, while Labour was stuck between 19%-22% across every age group below 60. Among full-time students, the Greens led Labour by 42% to 18%.

Polls are snapshots and should never be treated as destiny, but the direction we are going in is impossible to ignore.

Why has it changed? I do not think it is a mystery. The last Labour government was not brave enough, not clear enough and too often did not show enough backbone. It looked like it was being led by the polls, only for poll after poll to lead it down a blind path. 

Young people did not see a clear picture of the country Labour wanted to build, or where they fitted into it. Burnham addressed this lack of clarity in his first speech as Labour leader: Labour will not rebuild its support by trying to “out-Green the Greens or out-Reform Reform”. He has a chance to reset Labour’s relationship with the younger electorate.

Votes at 16

Votes at 16 will be an early test, and will be complicated by the suspicion that young voters, according to the polling, are no longer with the Labour Party.

In my mind, any sort of u-turn would be a huge error. It would send exactly the wrong message to young people: that we take you for granted; that we do not really believe you deserve a voice, that we listen only when it suits us, and when your political views become inconvenient, our principles become negotiable.

Reversing votes at 16 would be catastrophic, not only for the 13, 14 and 15-year-olds expecting to vote at the next election, but for the 16 and 17-year-olds watching what Labour does. It would signal a lack of confidence both in them and in ourselves.

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So the new Labour government should not only recommit to votes at 16. It should double down.

But votes alone will not rebuild young people’s trust. They must be matched by a serious offer on the issues shaping their lives.

Over the last year I have listened to more than 1,100 young people across the country: teenagers still at school and young people who are not in education, employment or training.

What we heard was not apathy, nor a generation that had stopped caring about democracy. It was frustration. These young people were sophisticated, sharp, idealistic and deeply suspicious of hype. They were disillusioned with the way politics is practised, not with democracy itself.

Among the 16- and 17-year-olds we spoke to, all of whom were still in education, 64.5% were proud to be British and 77% remained hopeful about their own futures. Yet 73.8% believed the country was heading in the wrong direction.

This is a generation that still believes in its own future but which has lost confidence in the country’s leadership.

In our work with young people who are NEET, we found a rejection economy: hundreds of job applications, often met with silence; entry-level jobs demanding experience they cannot gain; transitions that felt like cliff edges rather than springboards; and a bedroom generation spending months or years at home, online, slowly losing confidence and purpose.

But we also found extraordinary talent. Young people building businesses through TikTok, fixing cars, caring for animals, making furniture, creating art and teaching themselves languages.

They were not short of ambition or talent. Too often, the system had failed to recognise either. As we argued in our report, young people face too few ladders of opportunity and far too many snakes along the way.

That is why the Milburn Review into the lack of opportunities for the young and the wider NEET agenda matter so much. Alan Milburn has helped put this issue at the centre of the national debate. His review must become the foundation of a much broader offer to young people.

A manifesto for young people 

What comes next must be Generation Ambition: a manifesto for young people that is ambitious, aggressive and clear about the adulthood we want them to have.

The answer is not simply to present a collection of policies that may improve life for somebody who turns 16 in three years, but to offer a picture of what we want today’s 16-year-old to have and feel when they are 20.

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This would combine a change in education, jobs and housing with a serious answer to the student debt crisis.

It must involve paid and meaningful work experience, clear vocational and academic routes and trusted adult at the moments that matter. You people want a first job that does not require three years of experience, as well as somewhere affordable to live and an overall sense that effort will be rewarded.

We may need to rethink the triple lock for older generations, but that debate must not stop us developing an equally serious offer for young people: a generational guarantee that every young person has a clear route forward and a fair chance to build a good life.

I believe Andy Burnham can do this. I grew up in Manchester and came of age politically while he was our mayor. I saw first-hand how a clear sense of direction, rooted in the identity and values of a place, could bring people together. Manchester under Burnham did not always get everything right, but it often felt like a city that knew where it was going and believed it could shape its own future. That sense of shared purpose mattered. 

He has already begun to make Labour feel hopeful again, something the party was so clearly lacking. Now he has to turn that hope into action for the next generation, and show young people not only that Labour hears them, but that it has a plan for their lives and a place for them in the country it wants to build.