A Year That Builds a Country

In Britain’s Expensive Habit of Standing Still, we examined a country that collects around £1.3 trillion in public revenue, spends considerably more and borrows the difference. Much of that expenditure is necessary. Yet too much maintains existing capacity, compensates for failure or pays interest on decisions already taken. Too little builds the productive capacity on which the country’s future depends.

National service offers an interesting way into this problem.

The traditional argument is familiar. Young people lack discipline, practical experience and a proper understanding of responsibility. A year or two of service would do them good.

There may be something in that, but it is too easy. Britain has dismantled many of the institutions through which previous generations acquired practical competence, social confidence and responsibility for people beyond their immediate circle. Industrial apprenticeships have declined, youth clubs and cadet organisations have disappeared from many communities, and the first experience of sustained work now comes later for a growing number of young people. We cannot steadily remove meaningful routes into adulthood and then complain that young people are not growing up quickly enough.

Social media has hardly helped. But the answer is not another lecture about screen time. It is to create something more compelling in the physical world: difficult work, shared purpose, practical achievement and responsibility to people who are actually present.

The better question is whether we could trust young people with work that matters. What if every young person spent a properly paid year developing useful skills while contributing to the country? Some might serve in the armed forces. Others could work in cybersecurity, emergency response, healthcare, social care, engineering, infrastructure or environmental restoration. Every route would involve serious training, recognised qualifications and genuine responsibility.

It would not be something done to young people for their own good. It would be an investment made with them in capabilities Britain has allowed to decline.

A generation underestimated

There are now more than one million people aged 16 to 24 in the UK who are not in education, employment or training. The proportion reached 13.5% in the first quarter of 2026, including 928,000 people aged 18 to 24. Many are economically inactive rather than formally unemployed. Office for National Statistics

This is a profound waste of human capacity, but the problem is not confined to those classified as NEET. Many young people pass successfully through school and university without acquiring much practical experience. They may know how to pass an examination but not how to lead a team, repair anything, respond in an emergency, manage a budget, care for someone vulnerable or work alongside people whose lives are completely different from their own.

That is not a criticism of their intelligence or character. It is a criticism of what we have asked of them and the opportunities we have provided.

At the same time, Britain has persistent shortages in defence, engineering, construction, healthcare, environmental management and digital security. Rivers go inadequately monitored. Infrastructure is inspected and repaired too late. Communities struggle to respond to floods and other emergencies. Public institutions lack basic cyber capability. Large restoration commitments are announced without anything approaching the field capacity required to deliver them.

We have young people who need experience and a country that needs work done. There is at least the beginning of an economic proposition here.

What national service could mean

National service should not be synonymous with military conscription. Defence would be an important route, particularly as Britain attempts to strengthen its armed forces and reserves, but it would sit alongside other forms of service of equal standing.

A national service year could offer six broad routes:

• defence and national security;

• cyber, AI and technical service;

• health and social care;

• engineering and infrastructure;

• emergency and community resilience;

• land, water and ecosystem restoration.

The route would reflect aptitude, personal circumstances, national requirements and, as far as possible, preference. Someone already undertaking a substantial apprenticeship, military commitment or recognised caring role should not be removed from useful work to satisfy an administrative requirement. Their existing contribution could count towards the obligation.

Service would normally begin at around the age of 18 and last twelve months, with flexibility for participants completing school, an apprenticeship or another recognised commitment. Some specialist defence and technical routes might run for longer where the training justified it. Participants would receive proper pay, accommodation or travel support where needed, accredited training and a completion asset that could be used for further education, housing, enterprise or additional technical qualifications. If Britain asks for a year from every young person, it must give them something of lasting value in return.

What could Britain build with a billion hours?

The economic objection is immediate. A universal service year would be expensive. A typical UK age cohort contains roughly 750,000 to 800,000 people. Paying 800,000 participants the current minimum wage for 18- to 20-year-olds, £10.85 an hour, for a 37.5-hour week would cost around £17 billion annually. The 2026 National Minimum Wage

Training, supervision, equipment, accommodation, transport, insurance, administration and the completion asset would add considerably more. Depending on its design, the annual Exchequer cost might reach £25 billion to £30 billion.

That is a large number. It is not, however, the complete economic cost or benefit. A participant’s wage is simultaneously government expenditure and household income. The headline figure also ignores the useful work produced during the year.

If each participant contributed around 1,300 productive hours after training, leave and administration, one cohort would provide more than one billion hours of service. Valued conservatively at £15 an hour, that represents around £15.6 billion of annual capacity. At £20 an hour, it approaches £21 billion.

This would not represent cash returned to the Treasury, and not every hour could automatically be valued at an assumed wage. The work would have to be additional, useful and properly supervised. Nevertheless, the scale changes the character of the argument. Britain would not simply be spending £25 billion on a very large personal-development programme. It would be mobilising more than one billion hours of useful capacity, broadly equivalent to over 600,000 full-time working years.

That capacity could provide cyber protection for schools and councils, support isolated older people, improve emergency preparedness, assist housing retrofit, monitor infrastructure, restore rivers and wetlands, and increase the military and civil reserves available in a crisis.

The first economic test would compare the cost of each route with the additional value of the services and assets it produced. We would need to deduct work that would have happened anyway, output that failed to meet the required standard, the time contributed by supervisors and any displacement of existing employees.

We must also count what participants would otherwise have produced. Delaying a good apprenticeship, productive employment or university by a year has a real opportunity cost. That cost will vary considerably across the cohort and is another reason why existing high-quality training and service should qualify.

Conventional appraisal may still miss one of the most immediate benefits: the value of being useful. Work that matters provides structure, social contact, physical and mental activity, and a reason to get up in the morning. Completing a difficult task, contributing to a team and seeing the result can create a sense of agency that neither passive education nor unemployment reliably provides. Some of that value may later appear in better health, higher earnings or lower public expenditure. Some matters simply because a year spent engaged and useful is better than a year spent isolated and drifting.

The arithmetic remains more promising than the headline cost initially suggests.

The return after the year

The larger economic return would emerge after participants completed their service. Government analysis estimates that one year spent outside education, employment or training is associated with approximately £52,000 in lost lifetime earnings and £29,000 in lifetime costs to the state. These figures include long-term effects on employment, tax receipts, National Insurance and benefit expenditure. Young People and Work review

Suppose national service prevented or shortened a period of economic disconnection for only 10% of an 800,000-person cohort. That would affect 80,000 young people. On the government’s indicative estimates, the resulting lifetime effects could include around £4.2 billion in additional participant earnings and £2.3 billion in improved public finances.

That is before considering the effect on everyone else.

The discounted value of lifetime earnings for a young person has been estimated at approximately £900,000 to £1.3 million. If the training, confidence, networks and experience acquired through service increased average lifetime productivity across the cohort by only 1%, the present value could be around £9 billion. A 2% improvement would approach £18 billion. Research used in the National Citizen Service evaluation also associates stronger teamwork, leadership, responsibility, initiative and problem-solving with higher lifetime earnings, although causality and the size of the effect remain uncertain. National Citizen Service evaluation

None of these figures proves that national service would pay for itself. The effects cannot simply be added together without examining overlaps. They would occur over different periods and would need to be adjusted for additionality, attribution, displacement and uncertainty. Future benefits should also be discounted, using the Treasury’s current real social discount rate of 3.5% for the first 30 years. HM Treasury Green Book

They do, however, reveal something compelling. National service would not need to transform every participant, create thousands of technology companies or eliminate youth unemployment to become economically credible. Useful work during the year, a relatively small reduction in economic disconnection and a modest improvement in lifetime capability could plausibly recover a substantial proportion of the cost.

This is particularly important because the alternative is not free. Britain already spends heavily on unemployment, preventable illness, social isolation, crime, emergency recovery, skills shortages and environmental degradation. Those costs appear across different departments and at different times, so they are rarely considered together. We pay them nevertheless.

What other countries can teach us

Britain does not need to invent national service from scratch. Other countries have developed different systems in response to their own geography, politics, security and social needs. None provides a template we could simply import, but several reveal useful design principles.

Finland may offer the clearest lesson in national resilience. Its approach is built around total defence: the ability of the state, economy and population to continue functioning during a military or civil emergency. Military service lasts 165, 255 or 347 days, depending on the role, with longer periods for specialists and leaders. A civilian alternative is available for those who do not undertake armed service. Finnish Defence Forces

The important point is that the capability remains after the initial period ends. Participants join a reserve rather than simply completing a programme, receiving a certificate and disappearing from the system.

Norway contributes a different lesson. Service obligations apply to men and women, but the armed forces select the people they need and can train properly. This places quality above the administrative satisfaction of filling positions for an entire cohort. Women represented 28% of those completing initial service in 2025. Norwegian Armed Forces

Singapore shows what happens when national service is treated as permanent national infrastructure rather than a temporary youth initiative. Male citizens and permanent residents complete two years of full-time service in the armed forces, police or civil defence, followed by reserve obligations that can continue until the age of 40 or 50. The system supports responses to terrorism, natural disasters and health emergencies as well as military defence. Singapore Central Manpower Base

In Israel, young people gain access to advanced technology, difficult operational problems and responsibility for real outcomes. They work in small teams, make decisions under pressure and form networks that often survive long after their service ends. Unit 8200 is the best-known example and has produced an unusual concentration of technology entrepreneurs and investors.

The lesson is not that conscription automatically creates unicorns. Those entering elite units are already highly capable, and Israel’s technology economy also reflects strong universities, immigration, defence research, government procurement, venture capital, geopolitical necessity and a high tolerance for failure.

The useful lesson is simpler. Young people develop quickly when they are given hard problems, advanced tools, trusted colleagues and meaningful responsibility.

Britain tends to ration those experiences. Graduates can spend years performing junior tasks before being trusted with decisions of any consequence. National service could bring responsibility forward, particularly in cyber, AI, engineering, intelligence, logistics and environmental monitoring.

Together, these examples suggest the elements of a British model: Finland’s lasting reserve, Norway’s emphasis on quality, Singapore’s institutional seriousness and Israel’s willingness to trust selected young people with difficult technical problems. Britain’s opportunity would be to apply those principles across military and civilian service rather than copying any country’s system wholesale.

From water monitoring to national resilience

The environmental route provides a practical example. In Who Will Rebuild Britain’s Water System?, Route2 argued that water should be understood as a public resource even where private companies operate parts of the system. Ownership of infrastructure does not amount to ownership of the rain, rivers, aquifers and catchments on which that infrastructure depends.

Yet Britain does not have enough people consistently observing and caring for those catchments. Environmental regulation is fragmented and frequently reactive. Rivers are tested intermittently. Small pollution events can go unrecorded. Sensors require maintenance. Wetlands, woodlands and riverbanks need continuing management rather than occasional projects and press releases.

Imagine that 100,000 national service participants followed a land and water route. After training, leave and supervision, they might provide around 130 million field hours annually. Even if only half were devoted to direct ecological activity, Britain would gain more than 60 million additional hours for water sampling, sensor maintenance, river surveys, invasive-species control, soil monitoring, wetland restoration, woodland management and local flood preparation.

These participants would not replace hydrologists, ecologists, farmers, engineers or employees of the water companies. They would work under professional supervision and provide something those specialists rarely possess at sufficient scale: sustained field capacity.

The value would not reside simply in the hours worked. It would appear in cleaner water, improved habitats, reduced flood risk, better evidence, healthier soils and more effective targeting of environmental expenditure.

A service team that identifies a failing river before it becomes an ecological disaster may prevent a future liability. A restored wetland can generate continuing flows of flood protection, water purification, carbon storage and habitat. Maintaining the condition of an asset matters just as much as creating it in the first place.

This is public expenditure leaving something behind.

Service to a shared inheritance

The same work provides a practical connection to Earth Shareholder. ESA’s Biomass mission represents a remarkable advance in our ability to observe the living Earth. Its radar can penetrate forest canopies to map forest structure and estimate the woody biomass stored in trunks and branches. Other satellite systems observe vegetation and land cover, while ecological models help estimate changes in biological productivity. All of this still depends on field surveys and measurements on the ground.

A national environmental service could become part of that measurement infrastructure. Trained teams could survey habitat condition, measure trees, collect soil samples, maintain environmental sensors and record changes in land management. Their observations could help scientists test and improve estimates derived from satellites, LiDAR and ecological models.

They would not calculate Britain’s net primary production by themselves. NPP measurement requires professional science, remote sensing, meteorological information and complex modelling. They could, however, provide the ground observations needed to make those estimates more reliable and locally useful.

This gives Earth Shareholder a tangible national expression. If the biological productivity of the living country forms part of our shared inheritance, every generation should be able to understand its condition and participate in its renewal.

That creates a reciprocal relationship. Young people inherit a claim upon the productive capacity of the country, while service gives them an opportunity to see, measure and restore part of what they inherit.

What would remain on the national balance sheet?

Britain does not need to start from nothing to assess national service. Much of the accounting architecture already exists. The UK National Accounts record production, income, expenditure and investment. Public-sector finances record the programme’s effect on government revenue, borrowing and expenditure. The National Balance Sheet records the market value of financial assets, land, buildings, machinery, infrastructure and intellectual property. Alongside these core accounts, the Office for National Statistics publishes environmental accounts, natural-capital accounts, human-capital estimates and experimental measures of inclusive income and wealth. UK National Accounts, National Balance Sheet

These are important pieces of the required framework. They do not yet form a coherent picture of national productive capacity. The core National Accounts are designed principally to measure economic activity and market transactions. The National Balance Sheet recognises financial and produced assets, together with land and certain other non-produced assets, but does not capture the full value of the health, skills, ecological systems, relationships and institutional capabilities on which future production depends.

The supplementary accounts extend that boundary. Natural-capital accounts estimate the physical flows, annual value and asset value of selected ecosystem services. Human-capital estimates examine people’s future productive capacity. Wellbeing measures capture aspects of life that income and production cannot. Experimental inclusive-wealth accounts bring produced, human and natural capital together. UK natural-capital accounts, UK inclusive income and wealth accounts

But these components sit across different statistical products. They use different boundaries, classifications, methods and publication cycles. Some form part of the core accounts, some are satellite accounts and others remain experimental. Social trust, resilience and much institutional knowledge are barely represented. Changes recorded in one account do not necessarily reconcile with changes elsewhere.

Most importantly, expenditure is not consistently connected to the condition of the asset it is supposed to support. Government can report how much it spent on training without showing the resulting change in lifetime capability. It can report the cost of flood recovery without placing that expenditure alongside the condition of the catchment. It can record spending on cybersecurity without identifying the usable technical capacity created. It can count environmental projects without showing whether the underlying ecosystem asset improved.

We can therefore see many of the inputs, some of the outputs and selected parts of the asset base. We cannot yet follow the complete chain from public expenditure, through activity and outcomes, to the resulting change in national productive capacity.

That is the missing framework.

Route2’s Value2Society (V2S) approach is intended to connect these existing pieces rather than replace them. It would use the official National Accounts, public-sector finances, National Balance Sheet and satellite accounts as its foundations, then reconcile them through a consistent framework across six forms of capital.

The V2S Position Statement would show the condition and value of the relevant assets at the beginning and end of each service year. The V2S Performance Statement would record the programme’s expenditure, revenues and effects across the six capitals, explaining what changed, why it changed and how that change related to the resources consumed.

Financial Capital would capture the resulting financial assets, liabilities and fiscal position. Manufactured Capital would include infrastructure, equipment and other produced assets. Human Capital would include health, practical skills and future productive capability. Intellectual Capital would include knowledge, data, innovation and institutional know-how. Social Capital would include trust, relationships and resilience. Natural Capital would include the condition and productive capacity of soils, rivers, forests, wetlands and coastal systems.

Where official accounts already provide the necessary data, the V2S framework would use and reconcile them. Where satellite or experimental accounts provide partial coverage, it would extend their application. Where important assets or effects remain unmeasured, it would make those gaps explicit rather than treating them as having no value.

A national-service environmental route, for example, would connect the expenditure and employment recorded in the core accounts with the fieldwork completed, changes in habitat condition, flows of ecosystem services and resulting natural-asset value. A cyber route would connect annual spending with systems secured, knowledge created and usable technical capacity. A care route would record additional provision and changes in wellbeing without claiming the work of existing professionals. Defence would connect expenditure with the trained and deployable reserve capacity remaining after participants completed their service.

This would also reinforce the distinction developed in Britain’s Expensive Habit of Standing Still. Some expenditure maintains existing capacity, some compensates for failure and some builds future capacity.

Monitoring rivers, servicing sensors and refreshing reserve skills maintain assets and capabilities that already exist. Responding to floods, supporting overwhelmed services or clearing pollution compensates for failures that have occurred. Training engineers, restoring wetlands, strengthening cyber defences and creating durable information systems build future capacity.

All three can be necessary, but they are not economically equivalent. Clearing up after a preventable flood provides immediate value and should be recorded as such. Restoring the wetland that reduces future flooding improves the underlying asset and lowers the expected future liability. One compensates for failure; the other changes the country’s future position.

The programme should therefore report more than participants, hours and annual expenditure. It should show how much activity maintained existing capacity, how much compensated for failure and how much created assets and capabilities capable of generating value beyond the service year.

Measurement would begin with the programme rather than being added afterwards. Participants and comparable non-participants should be followed for at least a decade. Government should publish the fiscal, economic and societal results by route, region and participant background, together with changes in the relevant forms of capital.

The question would then fit within Britain’s existing accounting system while completing the picture it cannot yet provide: after one year and perhaps £25 billion of public expenditure, what does the country possess that it did not possess before? National service should have to provide an answer.

Designing service worth giving

The risks are considerable. The most obvious is that the scheme becomes an enormous bureaucracy filled with low-quality placements. Young people would be moved around to satisfy numerical targets while host organisations gained subsidised labour and the state declared success because everyone had attended.

Another danger is that an informal hierarchy emerges between the different routes, shaped more by existing assumptions about status than by the difficulty or value of the work. The programme must resist that from the beginning. Every route should involve serious responsibility, high-quality training, recognised qualifications and the same completion benefits. Restoring a river, supporting an older person, securing a public computer system and preparing a community for flooding are different forms of service, but none is inherently lesser. Placements should reflect aptitude, preference and national need, rather than becoming a mechanism through which existing social divisions are reproduced.

The scheme would also need credible provision for disability, health limitations, caring responsibilities and conscientious objection. Universality need not mean identical treatment. It means a common expectation of contribution accompanied by a genuine opportunity for everyone to fulfil it.

Most importantly, service participants must not replace properly paid employees. Their work should add capacity, expand provision or create assets that would otherwise not exist. Host organisations would need accreditation, independent inspection and clear rules governing additionality.

The programme should also avoid becoming a single, centralised machine. National government could establish the obligation, funding, standards and system of qualifications, but delivery would need to involve the armed forces, local authorities, universities, charities, environmental organisations, infrastructure operators and properly accredited businesses.

A badly designed service year would be expensive, coercive and wasteful. A well-designed one would be demanding, reciprocal and valuable.

A year that builds a country

Britain is not short of money, intelligence or young people. It is short of institutions capable of turning those resources into lasting productive capacity. We spend heavily dealing with the consequences of ill health, weak skills, fragmented communities, environmental degradation and inadequate resilience. We intervene after young people become disconnected, after rivers become polluted, after homes flood, after systems fail and after shortages become crises.

A national service year would not solve all of this. It would not remove the need for professional armed forces, functioning public services, properly paid care workers, environmental regulators or long-term investment. Nor can we assume that making service compulsory would automatically make it useful.

But it would embody a different economic principle. Public expenditure should leave behind stronger people, healthier ecosystems, useful infrastructure, better information and greater capacity to respond. Young people should enter adulthood having been trusted with responsibility, trained in something that matters and given a genuine stake in the country they are being asked to serve.

The price could be £25 billion or more each year. That deserves scrutiny. But Britain already pays far more than that managing the accumulated consequences of capabilities it failed to build and assets it failed to maintain. The choice is not between spending £25 billion and spending nothing. It is between continuing to finance failure in fragments or investing deliberately in the people and systems that could prevent it.

A country that asks nothing meaningful of its young people should not be surprised when they feel little responsibility towards it. Give them serious work, proper training and a genuine share in what they are protecting, and a year of service could build far more than character.

It could help build the country Britain keeps paying for, but has somehow stopped creating.

This essay began as a line of enquiry developed through the work on Value2Society. ChatGPT was used as a thinking and editorial partner, testing the argument, challenging its edges and helping shape it for publication.