Thursday, November 14, 2024

The town where lockdown crushed the will to work

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Between March 2020 and March 2024, the economic activity rate in Pendle fell by 21.1pc, the second largest drop in England and Wales. At the same time, the number of people claiming benefits has surged by 150pc, 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 £64.7bn last year and will rise to £100.7bn 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 9.3m.

Worryingly, this problem is largely unique to the UK, 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 75pc to an unprecedented 80pc.

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.

Generation lockdown

Trapped at home and struggling to study, Ali soon started fighting back against his father. It was then, aged 16, that he became homeless.

Shortly after leaving home, he started college to study engineering, living in supported accommodation and working 16 hours a week just to get by. However, it soon became too much.

“It impacted my mental health and, because it was affecting me so much, I missed a year [of college], like a gap year,” says Ali.

However, Ali got help and a year later went back to college, this time to study health and social care. Now, he has a clear career plan and is hoping he can get a job as a nurse in the NHS.

A lifeline for Ali was the Pendle Youth Employment Service (Yes) Hub, a job centre for 16 to 24-year-olds set up by the council and Active Lancashire in 2021 in Nelson, Pendle’s largest town.

The project was set up in response to the emerging employment crisis in the wake of the pandemic.

“We could see that there was a group of young people who, if the time and effort wasn’t put into them, would be lost,” says Dave Marshall, the Hub’s project lead.

“They’d never learn skills, they’d never get to where they need to be. And we still see that today. The pandemic has definitely affected this generation massively.”

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