Neets review won't be for the faint-hearted - and will test Burnham's appetite for a welfare fight

It costs the taxpayer billions. And the human cost is variously described as a disaster, a national shame, even a moral crisis. When the phrase Neet was first coined by Tony Blair's Downing Street in 1999, the focus was on 170,000 or so teenagers who were not in education, employment or training.

After many attempts at solving the problem, add in a pandemic and years of a sluggish economy, it's acute - with nearly a million under-25s in that situation. How the government reacts will test its appetite and capacity for radical change, and the prime minister's real, not rhetorical, hunger for tricky political arguments. The canny smooth talker behind the huge review, former Labour MP Alan Milburn, wants you to know that Andy Burnham knows exactly what's coming.

Speaking to me in Liverpool, where in Merseyside 14.5% of 16 to 24-year-olds are unemployed, , external he tells me: "All the way through, the prime minister, the chancellor, all the ministers, they know what's going on.