The North East is England’s proudest region. There are good grounds for this. History is written across it: from Hadrian’s Wall to Bamburgh Castle.

But the North East is now where the failures of our education, labour and welfare systems converge: the meeting point of challenges both new and longstanding.

It has the highest rate of young people not in education, employment or training (NEET) in the UK, with almost a fifth of North Eastern 16- to 24-year-olds neither in work nor education. More worryingly, this is old news in the North East. Its rate of NEETs now is almost identical to its rate in 2006 and, even when rates fell across Britain in the 2010s, the North East’s remained the worst.

In June, we hosted a Big Listen with Fenwick at their flagship store in Newcastle, inviting over 120 frontline organisations, charities, and employers to ask what we might do together to tackle this crisis.