Welcome to Pendle, where lockdown didn’t just damage work – it crushed it. With jobs down 26% and young people struggling, the Telegraph’s Melissa Lawford explores how local efforts offer hope, but the pandemic’s scars run deep. Here’s an extract:
In the four years between March 2020 and March 2024, the employment rate in Pendle plunged from 74% to 47.9% – a fall of 26.1% and the biggest drop recorded in any of the 329 local authorities across England and Wales, analysis shows.
The employment rate has recovered to 58.3% since, but for a time less than half the local population was in work.
This is not because of a large rise in unemployment but rather because of a jump in the proportion of people who are economically inactive, meaning they are neither employed nor looking for a job.
Between March 2020 and March 2024, the economic activity rate in Pendle fell by 21.1%, the second largest drop in England and Wales. At the same time, the number of people claiming benefits has surged by 150%, one of the largest rises in the country.
Pendle shines a light on a national problem that has mystified economists and is costing the Government tens of billions a year in benefits and lost taxation. Spending on incapacity and disability benefits totalled £64.7 biilion last year and will rise to £100.7 billion in 2029-30, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR).
Worklessness has surged since Covid, with an extra 893,000 working-age adults classed as economically inactive since the pandemic began, bringing the total to 9.3 million.
Worryingly, this problem is largely unique to the U.K., which is now the only country in the G7 that has a lower employment rate compared to before the pandemic.
Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, has promised to fix the problem, with Labour campaigning on a pledge to get Britain’s employment rate up from 75% to an unprecedented 80%.
Since coming to power in July, the Government has started drawing up a “Get Britain Working” white paper, expected to be published this autumn, which Reeves says will “tackle the root causes of inactivity”.
However, any mention regarding the cost or legacy of the pandemic was conspicuously absent from her maiden Budget speech.
Yet the message from Pendle is clear – more than four years on from the start of the pandemic, a large chunk of Britain’s workforce is still broken by lockdown. …
Nationally, the number of people who are economically inactive because of long-term sickness has surged by 638,000 since the pandemic began to hit 2.8 million, according to the ONS.
Mental health is a major driver, and the change is particularly stark among the younger generation. …
Since it opened in 2021, 1,269 16 to 24 year-olds have been referred to the Pendle Youth Employment Service (Yes) Hub – 240 of whom have now gained employment and 225 are now enrolled in education or training.
But without individual, tailored support, many young people across the country face a cliff edge when they leave school – and they are increasingly slipping through the net.
The number of 16 to 24 year-olds not in education, employment or training (Neet) has surged by 109,000 since the pandemic and is at a nine-year high, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Almost all of this increase has been driven by young men.
Fewer children are also attending school altogether. Cases of “severe absence” from school have surged by 160% since 2020, with one in five children now “persistently absent” from the education system, according to the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ). …
Local employers in Pendle warn that Covid and the shift online have also had a long-term impact on attitudes to work.
“I think the country as a whole has almost lost that sense of responsibility. People used to have a bit more pride,” says John McBeth, the business manager at Pendle Support, a local care company that employs around 100 people.
The move to remote working has made people feel less accountable, says McBeth. “They didn’t have to get out and go to the office and park the car. We’ve had some people where we’ve done interviews over Zoom and they’ve been sat there in their pyjamas.”
McBeth has also struggled with employees who simply do not show up.
“We’ve had staff who have rung us and said ‘I’m not coming to work today’, and we’ve said, ‘Are you poorly? What’s wrong with you?’ And they say, ‘No, I’m just not coming to work today,’” says McBeth.
“When we go down the route of saying ‘that’s not acceptable’, they’re like, ‘What do you mean?’”
Lee has experienced the same problem. “They say, ‘I’m feeling a bit sad today so I don’t want to come to work.’ That is certainly a running theme among the younger members of the team.”
Worth reading in full.
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