Amol Rajan

speaker

3,997 appearances 23 recordings 6 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 16 Jul

Amol Rajan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 12.

Appearances

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Radical · Happiness Rules: Should Wellbeing Dictate Government Policy? (Lord Richard Layard) · 2 Jul 2026 podcast

And I'm starting to wonder if basically the last 15 years have been a uniquely difficult time to be young.

You know, since 2010...

Social media, smartphones, even before the pandemic, which was incredibly rough and tough on young people.

We do have this absolutely astonishing, not just crisis, but really I'd say worse than that, catastrophe for young people in this country.

The team sent me some statistics, which I just want to...

put to you because I think it's really important that people listen to this, have the facts.

In 2023, a couple of years ago now, three years ago now, about one in five children and young people aged eight to 25 had a probable mental disorder.

This was 20.3% of eight to 16 year olds, 23.3% of 17 to 19 year olds, and nearly 22% of 20 to 25 year olds.

In other words, if you're 18 in this country, there's about a one in four chance you've got a mental disorder.

That's an absolutely astonishing fact.

Next, we get on to NEETs.

957,000 people aged 16 to 24 are NEET or were in the last measure.

That's 12.8% of that age group.

So these are young people who should be in the prime of their lives and one in eight of them, one in seven of them roughly, are not in education, employment or training.

Of course, if they move on to welfare, they're likely to stay on welfare for a very, very long time.

It's hard to get off it.

And a final thing here, this is from the charity Mind.

As of April 2024, a record 4.5 million children in the UK were growing up in relative poverty.

Now, the Labour government have changed the two-child benefit cap and they're doing a lot, they would say, to try and reduce that.

But I find those statistics so appalling and so shocking.

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