The House Article | A UK-EU youth mobility scheme is an absolute no-brainer

4 min read11 December 2025

With talks over the SAFE fund sagging and goodwill thinning, the UK-EU relationship needs a win: something concrete and mutually beneficial. The Youth Experience Scheme is not a side issue but the obvious place to start proving the reset is real. Get this right and progress on the rest becomes far easier. Get it wrong, and the momentum built this spring may evaporate.

For all the warm language at May’s summit, particularly European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen’s words that SAFE access would be agreed “within a matter of weeks” and the insistence in London and Brussels that a new chapter has begun, the machinery of cooperation is still prone to seizing up. And unless both sides find a way to turn easy wins into actual agreements, the reset risks fizzling out before it has even properly begun.

That is precisely why the youth mobility question matters more than its technocratic title suggests. A Youth Experience Scheme (YES) might look like a minor, even niche, part of the UK–EU agenda. It is nothing of the sort. Cracking this nut could create the trust required to unlock movement on everything else, from agri-food and energy arrangements to wider regulatory cooperation. And, as this week’s new cross-party UK Trade and Business Commission report argues, it is one of the very few areas where a deal is not only possible, but popular, economically sensible, and cost-neutral from a migration perspective.

In the febrile politics of post-Brexit Britain, that last point matters. Ministers have painted themselves into a corner with a pledge to reduce net migration, yet the UK’s existing youth mobility schemes have actually reduced net migration by more than 44,000 this year. That unexpected headroom allows for a scheme capped at the same 44,000 visas each way, restoring lost opportunities for young people while keeping the government’s migration arithmetic intact. As Professor Brian Bell of the Migration Advisory Committee puts it, the impact on the UK’s overall migration numbers would be “essentially zero”.

In other words, this is one of the vanishingly rare areas where both sides can give ground without really giving anything up. A two-year reciprocal scheme, extendable by one more, open to 18–30-year-olds and not tied to a specific purpose, would allow young Brits to live and work in Paris, Amsterdam or Berlin just as EU nationals could do the same in Cardiff, Belfast or Edinburgh. Polling commissioned for the report shows 72 per cent of the public support the idea, five times more than oppose it. In today’s Britain, that is as close to a consensus as you are likely to find.

More importantly, a YES deal would help re-establish the people-to-people connection that Brexit severed. The generations now entering adulthood have been shut out of opportunities their older peers took for granted: the chance to live abroad, test a career path, learn a language, or simply discover that borders on a map need not become borders in the mind. The UK likes to talk about projecting soft power; there is no softer or more powerful tool than enabling young people to experience one another’s societies directly.

It would also be a practical demonstration that the UK and EU can still strike balanced, good-faith deals even when their priorities diverge. Negotiations will always involve asks that can’t be met, but the point is to bank what can be agreed and move forward. A success on YES would show that both sides are capable of that maturity. Failure signals the opposite.

If London and Brussels are serious about rebuilding cooperation, they should take the gift horse in front of them. A capped, balanced, popular YES is the low-hanging fruit both sides need. I just hope that with this report in their back pocket, political will can finally match political rhetoric.

Naomi Smith is CEO of Best For Britain.