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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I dislike your headline “The Real….”.
“Yet another real….”
would read a lot better.
Thank you Chris for your time putting this informative item together. Every piece of pushback against the madness is important.
Accurate satellite data measuring sea ice extent was gathered throughout the 1970’s as it was critical for managing the nuclear deterrent. It clearly shows that the ice extent reached a peak in 1979 – the year, strangely enough that records used for climate propaganda begin. Including this data would show there has been nothing remotely unusual going on with Arctic sea ice extent.
Raise this point and you’re met with handwaving and muttering about incompatible datasets. Funny how this hasn’t stopped alarmist academics stitching together datasets from ocean buoys and ship intakes, or tree rings and thermometers (Mike’s ‘Nature’ trick), or satellite Microwave Sounding Units and surface thermometers, or weather balloons and computer models.
Something with mentioning here: The definition of ice age is a time during which permanent surface ice sheets exist. Consequently, we’re currently living in an ice age that’s possibly receding.
Additional fun fact: One of the reason why people believe in antrophogenic climate change is that – according to some mathematical models of ice ages – the current interglacial period (the holocene) should have ended already. Ie, weren’t it for terrible influence humans have on the climate, we’d all be again hunting mammoths on glaciers by now.
Obviously, the idea that these models could be wrong never crossed anybody’s mind.
The earth has been in an ice age for at least 2 million years, we just happen to be in a relatively short lived interglacial period and what most people call an ice age is a glacial period. Taking a long term view (thousands of years) we seem to be heading into the next glacial period all be it with ups and downs along the way. The paleoclimate record shows various warm periods over at least the last 4,000 years e.g. Medieval Warm Period, Roman Warm Period etc. Our current warm period is simply the latest in a long succession of warm and cool periods, however it appears that each warm period is slightly less warm than the previous one, so the temperature trend over the last 5-6,000 years is slightly downwards.
“He adds that satellite images and recordings going back to 1993 show sea levels rising at a mere 1.2 inches per decade, and this is not significantly different to typical rises recorded since the mid-1800s.”
Chris, interesting but 1.2 inches between now & 2100 is about 27cm which earlier in the article you state was “false & easily disproven”, which is it?
Assuming the 1,2 inches per decade is correct, it would be 23.37cm by 2100, ie, 3.36cm less than 27cm. That should count as disproven.
We have tide information from e.g. Newlyn, going back several hundred years, showing little growth in sea levels. 1993 is just the blink of an eye. There are far too many conclusions being drawn from data that doesn’t cover anything like a truly representative period of time.
Climate has nothing to do with the ‘Climate Emergency’. It is just a convenient group of stuff you can’t measure and which never seems to happen where I live, used as a tool to make us feel guilty for our lives of affluence and abundance.
Once we are both anxious and guilty, as many are, then it becomes easy to sell us any old snake oil of wholesale societal change to some romanticised version of 12th century feudalism. A world where, for no particular reason, other that it is the ideology of the WEF and the Club of Rome and others, our economies and societies have to be completely trashed in order that they can be replaced with something ‘better’.
Unfortunately, the ‘something better’ sounds considerably worse to me, yet our governments plough on implementing this treason, without reference to the citizens or gaining their approval. Just ‘here’s the next step’, necessary because of the crisis we just caused. These people are dangerously insane.
Feudalism is still a Marxist term referring to an economic system where the primary means of production is land and not capital but where land is no longer worked by slaves but either by free labourers for a wage or by serfs bound to it. Whatever the usual shady entities are suspected to be really about, it’s certainly not going to be that.
The Climate Change propaganda originates with the UN and is their chosen method of forcing down the living standards of affluent western countries and transferring taxpayers’ money to the 2nd and 3rd world.
It’s a form of “levelling down” on a global scale – with a Global Elite running everything. A Global Animal Farm.
Any National Leader who doesn’t support the Climate Change propaganda will never be allowed to join the Global Elite Club and (if possible) will be removed from Office.
Quote “the jab wasn’t a vaccine, it was an intelligence test” and the same applies to climate change and EV vehicles.
Would like to see this headlined on all msm.
We’ll know we’re winning when stories such as this make it into the MSM.