Callum Atkinson is 23 years old, and lives in the Greater Manchester town of Rochdale. Until very recently, he was one of hundreds of thousands of young people in the UK reckoned not to be in education, employment or training: what officialspeak rather coldly terms a Neet, and therefore part of a huge national problem being investigated by the former New Labour high-up Alan Milburn, whose final report on young people and work is due any day now, and will be a big, hyped-up political event.

Milburn – quite rightly – thinks the UK’s estimated 981,000 Neets represent the profound risk of “a lost generation” and a “moral crisis” that is already upon us. If you are interested in matters of finance as well as ethics, you may also be aware that the annual cost of maintaining such young people was recently put at £125bn, which is more than the British state spends on either education or defence.

Until a month or so ago, Callum told me last week, he was one tiny element of those statistics. He has three A-levels graded at A, B and C, respectively in maths, further maths and computer science: although educational failure is a major factor in the current crisis, 21% of Neets have at least one A-level or its equivalent, and 15% have graduated from university. What his life so far does point up, however, is the labyrinthine lunacy and callousness of the modern labour market, and how its serial failures are often only finally mended by small, ground-level organisations.

Six months ago, his last spurt of employment – working in finance, “organising invoices, making sure suppliers got paid on time, doing Excel reports” – lasted three months, before he collided with problems in his personal life and fell into a spell of depression. When he was let go by his last employer, he was put on universal credit. Most days, Callum told me, he sat in bed applying for jobs using his phone. “Maybe 600 or 700 at least. And the most I usually got back was an AI email saying, ‘I’m........

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