Britain has been stuck in a low earnings, low productivity, and low growth cycle for 18 years. Someone born in 2008, the year of the financial crash, will become an adult this year without having experienced the benefits of economic growth. Young people are bearing the brunt of economic failure, as they struggle to find jobs with youth unemployment at 16%. Little wonder that this is an issue the Government has turned its attention to with the Milburn Review.

A flatlining economy is starving young people of opportunities, but low growth is itself a product of failure to realise potential. That's why it's important to see growth and reform as two sides of the same coin, as many cities and mayors do. In Greater Manchester this link between economic progress and public service reform has been understood for two decades. An early move was to establish reform and prevention boards, pooling the public health grant across local authorities, and establishing ‘Work Well' to keep more people at risk of ill-health in work. Reducing poverty, ill-health and worklessness is as central to growth as urban densification, business innovation and connectivity. That's why many combined authorities (CAs) have developed local growth plans that combine both of these elements.

Alan Milburn likened the situation facing young people to being stuck on a downward escalator descending into long-term unemployment, unfulfilled lives and growing mental health problems. We urgently need to reverse this with action to support young people and to give them real opportunities and a stake in their future.

Mayors, CAs and council leaders are rightly calling for powers and funding to get on with building a better future for their young people. They've also done a lot of thinking and practice development on what that could look like, from Barnsley's Pathways to Work commission to South Yorkshire's innovations on support for young people, and from East Midlands' Opportunity Escalator to Greater Manchester's Prevention Demonstrator. The next step should be to devolve employment support responsibilities to CAs, to change the criteria for Youth Guarantee eligibility, so that it kicks in much earlier and to enable mayors and councils to work with local businesses to deliver jobs for young people.

The Growth and Reform Network was set up to support mayors and councils on inclusive growth and public service reform. This should not be about abstract principles for reform, but instead needs to be focused on tackling the barriers that stand in the way of more rapid, inclusive growth. The crisis of economic inactivity and unemployment facing young people is perhaps the most pressing challenge we face.

After the 2008 financial crisis the Government, worried about permanent economic scarring for young people, introduced the Future Jobs Fund to create more than 100,000 jobs for young people. The current Government has borrowed from this with its Youth Jobs Guarantee, but there are two important differences between the two.

Firstly, the Future Jobs Fund applies after six months of unemployment, whereas for the Youth Guarantee it is 18 months. Secondly, the Future Jobs Fund was mobilised rapidly and delivery was left to local leaders, whereas the Youth Guarantee is a national scheme.

Alan Milburn likened the situation facing young people to being stuck on a downward escalator descending into long-term unemployment, unfulfilled lives and growing mental health problems. We urgently need to reverse this with action to support young people and to give them real opportunities and a stake in their future.

While this should be baked into integrated settlements, we cannot afford to wait that long. The starting point should be large-scale pilot programmes in urban areas with the highest concentrations of economic inactivity and youth unemployment. In our report with the Future Governance Forum, Strengthening the Foundations of Combined Authorities, we called for purposeful experimentation on employment support with CAs. As Government appears to have reached an impasse with its MPs on welfare reform, why not work with mayors to deliver this?

They should be given the powers and the programmes to invest in tailored, locally-led employment support and job provision. And there should be experimentation over gainshare-type financial arrangements for risk and incentivisation, where mayors who improve results for young people keep some of the savings to reinvest in prevention.

This will build a better future for young people, and cut the welfare bill.

Ben Lucas is chair of the Growth and Reform Network and founding director of Metro Dynamics