Monday 4 July 2022 12:51 AM Thousands of firms are struggling to hire staff writes RUTH SUNDERLAND trends now
On the seashore at Redcar last week, the coke ovens at the defunct steelworks were blown to smithereens.
The demolition, making way for new green industries, brought back memories of how, in the 1980s, my father Alan lost his job after 40 years at a Teesside blast furnace.
Dad would have given anything to be able to work again, but in those days, no one was hiring. So he found himself, along with many others, thrown onto the scrapheap of long-term unemployment, at a terrible cost to his health and self-esteem.
Today, Britain has the opposite problem — or so it would seem on the surface.
Instead of too few jobs, resulting in legions of men and women on the dole, there is a bountiful abundance of situations vacant.
The ranks of the ‘economically inactive’ — those of working age who are not gainfully employed — have surged since Covid
So much so, that employers are straining to find the staff they need.
The official rate of unemployment, at just 1.3 million out of work, stands at 3.8 per cent, the lowest for 40 years.
Unfortunately, that rosy picture is deeply misleading, for there is a phantom army of millions of workless Britons who do not show up in that figure.
The ranks of the ‘economically inactive’ — those of working age who are not gainfully employed — have surged since Covid, with many of them having signed off long-term sick.
The number of people saying they are too poorly to work has increased by nearly 20 per cent between the spring of 2019 and the same point this year to 2.5 million people.
The vast majority of those, some 2.3 million, say their afflictions — whether related to physical or mental health — are long-term, implying they are unable or unwilling to contemplate a return to work any time soon.
In total, nearly nine million, or one in five working-age adults, are ‘economically inactive’. Some will have good reasons, such as caring for family members, and not all of them are claiming welfare.
But more than five million are on a variety of out-of-work benefits. That is far higher than the headline unemployment figure suggests, and a huge drain on the public purse.
Some less prosperous places, including my home town of Middlesbrough, are blighted by very high levels of worklessness, which is a concern for the Government’s levelling up agenda. It may not be as bad as in the 1980s, when UB40 sang about the one-in-ten, but it is not pretty.
The official unemployment rate in Middlesbrough is 7.3 per cent, nearly twice the national average. A much greater proportion, 28 per cent, is economically inactive. Of those, more than a quarter are long-term sick.
In other places, such as Blackpool, the story is similar.
This is not new. A high prevalence of people on long-term sickness benefits has been a feature of deprived communities for decades.
But the problem has been swept under the carpet and, as a consequence, a misleading impression has taken root that we have a robust labour market with a very low percentage of the population not working.
Until politicians put away their airbrushes and start admitting the truth about communities where sick notes are strewn like confetti, there is no chance of a solution.
Now that labour shortages are rife throughout the economy, we can no longer behave as though our ghost army of missing workers — at least some of whom could be coaxed back into a job with support and encouragement — does not exist.
The true extent to which Britain is not working gives rise to troubling questions. Why are so many shunning work, when good jobs are there for the asking?
The true extent to which Britain is not working gives rise to troubling questions. Why are so many shunning work, when good jobs are there for the asking? Are so many people really so ill — or is the UK suffering a different kind of malaise altogether?
The usual explanation advanced for the increase in inactivity and sickness is that people are suffering from so-called ‘Long Covid’, where patients have lingering symptoms from the virus.
Experts who have compared the UK with other developed economies, however, argue that this does not explain why our labour market has been slower to bounce back than in competitor countries.
‘Some of the increase in inactivity [in the UK] might be related to Long Covid,’ says Paul Dales, chief UK economist at Capital Economics. ‘But quite why the UK would be more exposed to that than other countries, I don’t know.’
Good question. Covid knows no national boundaries, but could
