By Martin Banks

EU auditors say the European Union’s efforts to support young people’s integration into the labour market remain insufficiently focused on results.

This is according to a new report published by the European Court of Auditors (ECA).

This is the body that oversees EU finances and fraud issues.

The report, out on Friday, points out that employment is primarily a member state responsibility which the EU budget supports or complements.

Although youth unemployment has fallen significantly over the last 10 years, the EU-funded measures “still lack focus” on helping young people to stay employed over the longer term. said the Court.

Youth employment has long been one of the main labour-market challenges facing EU member states.

While the unemployment rate for young people aged 15-29 has fallen from 20 % in 2013 to below 12 % in recent years, young people are still twice as likely to be unemployed as the overall workforce.

In 2025, around 4.7 million young people were unemployed in the EU, or 11.6 % of the youth labour force aged 15-29.

Carlo Alberto Manfredi Selvaggi, the ECA Member in charge of the audit, said, “EU support for youth employment needs to demonstrate that it delivers lasting value.

“Without clearer objectives and better evidence of long‑term results, it is difficult to know whether public funds are truly making a difference for young people”.

Although responsibility for youth employment policies lies primarily with the member states, the EU plays a coordinating and supporting role.

It provides strategic guidance, especially via the annual cycle of economic, fiscal, and social policy coordination through the European Semester and national reform programmes, which have now been replaced by medium‑term fiscal structural plans.

Since the Youth Employment Package was launched in 2012, substantial EU resources have been raised to support young people’s access to work.

Since 2014, the EU has allocated around €25 billion through cohesion policy specifically to support youth employment, including the European Social Fund (ESF), the Youth Employment Initiative (YEI), REACT‑EU, and the European Social Fund Plus (ESF+).

Italy and Spain together account for nearly half of the funding, receiving almost 47.5 % of the total.

EU‑supported measures, said the report, include hiring incentives for employers, training and coaching for young people, and actions to help them remain in employment once hired.

A key objective of the measures is sustainable labour-market integration.

This, it goes on, includes ensuring that young people not only find a job, but remain employed once financial support has ended. In this regard, employment retention after 12 or 18 months could serve as a strong indicator of success.

However, the longer-term result indicators currently report only on beneficiaries’ employment status after six months.

The auditors concluded that the Commission has only patchy information about the longer‑term results of EU financial support for youth employment.

The auditors also found that the operational programmes they examined had no clear definition of when a young person could be considered as successfully integrated into the labour market.

“This reduces the clarity of objectives and increases the risk of EU funds being allocated without sufficiently specific or measurable targets. As a result, hiring incentives may not be well designed, carrying the risk of inefficient and ineffective use of public money, the auditors warn,” says the report.

The hiring incentives examined in the audit were insufficiently targeted towards those who need them the most, thus increasing the risk that public money supported jobs that would have been created anyway.

The auditors said they also found that the incentives were not linked to compulsory on-the-job training: this matters because training can not only improve young people’s employability in the longer term, but also help to address labour‑market needs, particularly in sectors facing skills shortages.

In addition, the audit highlighted the specific situation of young people outside the labour market — those who are not working and not actively seeking work, referred to as ‘inactive’ young people.

They often face social, educational or health-related barriers that go beyond labour market policy alone, says the report.

Although the current EU framework requires targeted outreach, inactive young people remain the hardest group to reach, the auditors note.