Kirsty Warner examines why there is reluctance from the UK to accept an EU youth mobility scheme and the impact this may have on UK-EU relations.
Ten months after the first formal proposal for an EU mandate to negotiate a UK-EU youth mobility scheme, little progress has been made. Since April 2024, the discussion has been largely one-sided: the EU has advocated an agreement, while the UK has been reluctant to engage. London has seemingly prioritised headline immigration figures over cultural and economic ties. Although the UK’s stance has evolved from outright rejection to cautious discussion, there remains deep political reluctance, hindering progress towards an agreement.
So, what is youth mobility? First, as Professor Catherine Barnard has stated, ‘It ain’t free movement’. Under the current proposal, EU and UK citizens aged between 18 and 30 years could stay for up to four years in the destination country. Youth mobility requires a visa and only allows temporary stays for work, study, or travel under specific and restricted conditions without granting settlement rights or unrestricted movement across EU member states. In contrast, free movement includes the right to live, work, and move freely across borders with a path to permanent residence. A frequently overlooked difference is that UK citizens will now be limited to residency and employment in a single EU member state rather than having unrestricted mobility across the entire bloc as with freedom of movement.
Yet successive UK governments have often deliberately misrepresented the proposal and conflated the scheme with free movement. When then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak swiftly rejected the EU’s proposal, he expressed concerns about potentially undermining Brexit red lines, risking potential future concessions and emphasised that free movement had ended with Brexit. Even in later discussions between Keir Starmer and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and during Starmer’s meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, the Labour government reaffirmed its commitment to strengthening UK-EU relations but, despite freedom of movement not being under discussion, explicitly ruled out freedom of movement describing it again as a ‘red line’.
Evidently, then, the UK’s reluctance to engage in a UK-EU youth mobility scheme is not purely a policy decision but a political framing born out of fear that appearing to engage with the EU could undermine hard-won ‘Brexit red lines’ and lead to further concessions. This contrasts with the EU’s perspective. For Brussels, youth mobility is a structured and reciprocal form of cultural and educational exchange, similar to its agreements with countries like Canada and New Zealand, rather than a backdoor to migration. Often, fractious debates in member states about immigration do not tend to encompass the movement of EU nationals. The UK, however, has increasingly failed to differentiate between EU and non-EU nationals.
Consequently, on those occasions when the UK has engaged in discussions on youth mobility, it has approached individual member states about signing bilateral youth mobility agreements, similar to its existing arrangements with Japan, South Korea, and Australia. However, this approach disregards the EU’s preference for bloc-wide agreements over fragmented bilateral deals. Indeed, it was partly a perceived risk of individual member states signing their own deals with London that prompted the European Commission’s May 2024 proposal for a negotiating mandate to manage youth mobility collectively.
From an EU perspective, bilateral agreements are diplomatically contentious; they encourage division within the union and set a precedent that weakens the EU’s authority in external negotiations. As such, a bloc-wide agreement is preferable. The UK’s assumption that bilateral agreements with individual countries would be sufficient reflects a broader post-Brexit pattern of misunderstanding how the EU functions and why it exists, resulting in misaligned proposals unlikely to gain traction in Brussels.
Brexit disproportionally impacted young people. As Sadiq Khan summarised, ‘it is young people who have been hardest hit in so many ways’. The UK was once a global hub for students and young people. Yet, since Brexit, there have been fewer job opportunities and increased visa and travel costs. Even systems of support, like the EU Settlement Scheme (EUSS), were designed in a way that privileged older generations via its reliance on formal documentation, stable employment records, and long-term residency.
The current mechanisms to support youth mobility are limited and fail to provide meaningful opportunities for reciprocal exchange. The withdrawal from Erasmus+ ended reciprocal exchange programs that allowed students to study, work, and gain cultural experience across Europe on equal terms. In its place, the UK introduced the Turing Scheme, which provides funding for UK students to study abroad but fails to offer reciprocity. The UK government’s decision to frame the Turing Scheme as an ‘improvement’ on Erasmus+ ignores the fundamental purpose of mobility agreements.
Whilst the youth mobility discussion appears to be gaining traction across UK politics, political reluctance, tied to the concept of ‘free movement’ and migration narratives, remains a barrier to future cooperation. The problem facing the UK is that absent any deal on youth mobility, it will be hard to secure other parts of the much-vaunted ‘reset’ to which London remains committed. At some point, it would seem, something will have to give.
By Kirsty Warner, Assistant Professor at the University of Warwick.