Andy Burnham has a difficult autumn ahead of him as he tries to solve two seemingly intractable problems: a Labour Party that is incredibly jittery about benefit cuts, and nearly one million young people not in education, employment or training. The pitch-rolling for his solution has already begun: there are briefings that the Government could take away the health element of universal credit for claimants under 25 and replace it with a package of support to get those young people into the workplace instead. There’s also the suggestion that personal independence payment, which ministers are widely expected to completely overhaul, could be replaced with a separate regime for the under-25s.

Those working on the reforms believe that Labour MPs can be convinced to see the package they are developing as a genuine investment in young people, with some tough love attached, rather than the kind of crude benefit cuts that sent backbenchers into serious revolt last year. There will be more targeted back-to-work schemes, and support for mental health, along with incentives for employers to take on young people. All of these ideas sound good, but the reality could be rather different.

Firstly, all of them have been tried before, and veterans of welfare reform point out that it is very easy for “targeted back-to-work” schemes to end up being pointless CV-writing workshops where claimants attend, pay no attention, and don’t learn any really valuable in-work skills that will help them to stay in employment if they manage to find a job. The hardest-to-reach young claimants can often just roll from one course to another without any discernible improvement in their skill set.

More support with mental health is an entirely laudable objective, and at least accepts some responsibility on the part of the state for the predicament that so many young people are in. Not all of them have formally diagnosed mental health problems, and some have been caught up in a culture that does pathologise the angst of everyday life to the extent that some young people are sold the myth that if they’re not thrilled to be working, then they must be depressed. Some of them have just ended up in quite mentally unhealthy situations, and that’s very much something the state has to answer for, given that it cancelled large periods of in-school teaching and therefore a normal adolescence for them during Covid. It gave the impression that education and work were somehow optional, in a way that had never really been suggested to the population en masse before, and at an impressionable time for this cohort of young people.

But many of them really do have a diagnosable – but treatable – mental health condition. And this is where the state has really failed. More than half of children on child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) waiting lists in England have been sitting there for more than a year. Around a third have been waiting for more than two years. Their conditions don’t pause while they’re waiting for treatment: often they worsen significantly. But the message they’ve been given by the state is that they aren’t a priority for treatment, and then they are told that they shouldn’t be ill and should actually be at work. While work is good for mental health generally, there does come a point where you really are too ill to be at work, both for your own safety and that of others.

If the Government wants to ensure that young people really are well enough to go into a job and hold it down, then it will need not just to ensure that CAMHS is running effectively, but also that mental health support for under-25s is available. It isn’t yet clear where that additional support might come from. CAMHS and adult mental health services both have severe staff shortages, with the vacancy rate for the mental health sector higher than that across the NHS. You cannot assemble a new mental health service like flat-pack furniture, and if the mental health support workers move into a jobcentre-type setting, then they are probably leaving the NHS. Either way, there won’t suddenly be more of them.

This isn’t to say that Burnham and his ministers aren’t looking at the right ideas or that the amount spent on welfare isn’t getting out of hand: it’s just that real change takes a huge amount of funding and effort to deliver properly and to really transform lives. And that is even harder than convincing a bunch of anxious backbenchers to walk through the voting lobbies with the Government. Because rather than just talk, it takes time and money.