I have written about the Milburn review and what it would do to me personally — the floor, the rent, the arithmetic. This is the other half of the story, and it is the more important one. The review is not an anomaly. Look at what this country has legislated about my generation and younger over the last few years and a pattern appears, and once you have seen it, Tuesday's report stops looking like a surprise.
Who will vote on this
When the report becomes a bill next year, it will be voted on by a House of Commons whose average member is around fifty, twenty of whose six hundred and fifty members are under thirty. Then it goes upstairs, to a House of Lords whose average member is seventy, and whose youngest members were born in the nineties. I did the arithmetic twice, because it looked like a misprint. It is not.
The proposal has an age limit, and every single person who will vote on it is on the safe side of that limit. None of them will ever be assessed for the youth allowance. None of them will ever have a PIP award converted into an additional cost allowance. You cannot vote yourself into the category this bill creates. You can only vote other people into it.
Alan Milburn last sat in Parliament sixteen years and seven prime ministers ago. I was five that year, in speech therapy, learning to speak my own native language. I am twenty-one now, and the system he has spent a year designing for my age group will not apply to him for a single day of his life.
In September I wrote that young people are not just the future — that we are already living with decisions made before we had a say. We Deserve a Say in the Future We Have to Live In. This is that principle with its boots on: a welfare system for under-25s, passed by two chambers that contain, between them, almost nobody it will ever apply to. If that is not a gerontocracy, the word does not mean anything.
The pattern
And the Milburn review did not come out of nowhere, because this is now a genre. Governments of both colours have taken a turn at it.
The Online Safety Act was the first entry: a regulatory regime, sold as child protection, that ended up reshaping how an entire generation accesses the internet — I wrote about it in September. Since the summer of 2025 the age checks attached to it have been deployed at scale. Ofcom counted sixty-nine million of them in six months. A social media ban for under-16s has now been announced on top of it, so the cohort below mine will grow up with a state-approved age gate on their social lives.
Then the Tobacco and Vapes Act passed in April. Let me be clear about where I stand, because it is not a complicated position: tobacco is harmful, obviously it is, and if it were up to me it would be banned for everybody. What I object to is the shape of the ban. Its centrepiece is a birth date: it will never be lawful to sell tobacco to anyone born on or after 1 January 2009. Not "until you are eighteen." Never. Everyone born before the line — every voter, every smoker, every member of both chambers — keeps exactly what they have. For the first time in this country's history, a birth date is written into permanent prohibition, and if tobacco is too dangerous to sell to someone born in 2009, it is too dangerous to sell to a man of seventy. If it is not too dangerous to sell to a man of seventy, then the health argument was never the whole argument. It was called world-leading. It is certainly a world-leading way of never asking anyone who can vote to give anything up.
Then the Universal Credit Act 2025 halved the health element for new claims to £217 a month and froze it until the end of the decade. The original plan for that same reform would have removed the health element from under-22s altogether; Parliament declined to swallow it then, so it went away and came back this week as a youth allowance for under-25s. Same idea. Wider net. New coat.
Smoking, socialising, sickness: three separate areas of the law, one shared mechanism. Write the youngest people into the rules by birth date, make the rules permanent, and make sure nobody the rules apply to was in the room when they were written. I was never asked about any of it — I was not asked about the big one ten years ago either — and I will not be asked about the next one. There will be a next one. This is a genre now.