Though they do not realise it, Robert and Amanda Reed from Barking in Essex are of unusual interest to Tony Blair and his government.

They are, believe ministers, part of a new and distinct social tribe gnawing away at Britain’s values and resources. In government offices, universities and think tanks throughout the country, dozens of academics and policy wonks are quietly measuring, monitoring and agonising over them.

Why? Because they are Neets.

It’s not a hair infestation and it’s not another word for cool. It’s the name being given to a particular group of young people who find themselves living on the margins of society.

Take Amanda, now 24. She played truant from school and dropped out at 16 with no qualifications. At 17 she had her first child, Jordan, and at 19 her second, Chloe.

“I wanted to become an actress and got a part in Grange Hill when I was 17,” Amanda said last week. “But I had to turn it down when I got pregnant.” She has no qualifications and apart from some casual modelling, she has never worked.

Family life was not easy and after falling pregnant with Chloe, she split from the children’s father. Later she married a childhood friend, Robert, and last year the couple had a baby of their own, Taylor.

Robert has followed a similar ground-skimming trajectory. He left school at 16 after failing all five of his GCSEs and started a plumbing course. He lasted two months before dropping out.

“After I left plumbing college I did a few days rough work here and there but then I just dossed as I wanted to do my own thing,” he said. “Before I realised it I had a family to support.”

Since quitting the plumbing course he has survived on state benefits. The couple live in a three-bedroomed council house on a rough estate and get by on £700 a month in welfare payments. They aspire to a new council flat in nearby Dagenham.

“We have to take every day as it comes,” said Amanda, who has never been abroad.

In Blair’s Britain there are millions of people on benefits of one sort or another, but the Reeds are in the special category known in Whitehall as Neet: not in education, employment or training.

A class of über-chavs, they encompass a wide range of people, from the law-abiding who have fallen on hard times, such as the Reeds, to the truly antisocial neighbours from hell. What they all have in common is that they are not doing anything productive and are costing taxpayers a fortune.

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