Why no British staff at Pret A Manger? My unsettling statistic of the week: the number of UK nationals in employment in the three months to December fell by 166,000 compared with the previous year, to 26.6m. Over the same period, the number of non-UK nationals in work rose to 2.6m, an increase of - exactly 166,000. The question posed is this: when there is so much slack in the labour market, with unemployment running at nearly 2.7m , how is it possible that so many companies still find it makes sense to take on foreign migrants? Part of the answer is to be found in the sectors where jobs are being created. When did you last buy a sandwich from a Briton at Pret A Manger, or check into a hotel where the majority of receptionists did not come from overseas? Restaurants, hotels and consumer-facing businesses of all kinds seem to have decided in recent years that young Britons are just not as good as others when it comes to friendly and reliable service, a serious work ethic - or simply turning up on time and on a regular basis. They may well be right. Chris Grayling, the employment minister, suggested tentatively this week that hiring people from eastern Europe with a few years" experience might have become the easy way out for companies. Perhaps we should look to give young people closer to home a chance, he said - "turning round the lives of somebody from a poor background, given no real opportunity in life - and end up with a model employee as a result." But if companies already have a ready supply from abroad of the motivated talent they require, why should they take on the risky and expensive job of hiring relatively unskilled people who too often seem to have an attitude problem? Anecdotes of failure are more common among employers in this respect than are stories about the star recruit who turned up from around the corner. Yet what seems to make sense for an individual company may not make sense for business as a whole. The number of households in the UK where no one has ever worked has doubled since 1998 to about 300,000, excluding the 70,000 or so that are occupied by students. Set this alongside other grim UK data, such as the very high proportion of young British men who are not in education, employment or training, and you see a pattern that has serious consequences both for household spending and consumption and for the public sector finances stretching way into the future. A growing underclass has damaging economic implications and represents a potential threat to social cohesion. It cannot simply be ignored. Of course, the long-term response must lie in policies that create the education and skills required for success at work. In the short term, welfare and benefit systems that provide the right incentives for work are a necessity, and the government is attempting to address these priorities. But the challenge is not just for politicians and schools. If companies are unhappy with the attitude of young British employees, it is up to them to do something about it - as an increasing number now are - by engaging with schools at all levels, offering decent workplace experience and providing the training needed to turn raw recruits into valuable employees. One example: an analysis this week by the Education and Employers Taskforce emphasised the value of high-quality work experience, but suggested more could be achieved if programmes were better organised. Roughly half of all placements are found by the schoolchildren or their families using largely existing social networks, thus placing barriers in the path of workless families. Perhaps companies could do more to pull in young people on placements. British business rightly places a high value on our flexible labour market. But if it fails to address this problem of collective action - and continues to rely too heavily on the easy way out in its recruitment efforts - then that flexibility will be put at risk. Governments cannot afford to sit back and watch the development of a cohort of unskilled unemployed youth with little economic stake in society. Mr Grayling was extremely circumspect this week. It's not impossible to imagine a future minister taking a more aggressive stance, and imposing on business the kind of compulsory training regime that would stifle enterprise and hold back growth. The jobs data need to be seen as a call to action. The writer is former director-general of the CBI and a previous FT editor