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The town where lockdown crushed the will to work

Britain’s workforce is still paying the price for the insidious effects of the pandemic

Ali was first physically abused by his father around the time he started secondary school.
“There was a point when my dad strangled me and then the next day I went to school with marks on my neck,” he says.
Then came lockdown. “My dad wasn’t able to get out of the house,” says Ali, whose name has been changed. Neither could he.
Covid struck when Ali, now 19, was in Year 10. While trying to study from home in preparation for his GCSEs, Ali’s father not only physically attacked him but also confiscated his phone and laptop.
While Ali’s experience is one of extreme adversity, he is not alone in having his education and early working career severely disrupted by lockdown.
Whether it be school closures, social isolation or the shift to home working, all are factors that have had an insidious impact on a workforce already grappling with rising health problems and a skills deficit.
The scale of the problem is growing increasingly clear in some parts of government, as noted by employment minister Alison McGovern.
“The lockdown generation has been consigned to the scrapheap – denied the opportunity to get into work, and progress in a career,” she says.
However, it is businesses across the UK that are confronting the issue first-hand, as they warn over the number of young people who are work-shy and overwhelmed by stress – with Britain’s economy paying a heavy price.
Nowhere is the impact of the pandemic clearer than in Pendle, the rural district in east Lancashire where Ali grew up. It is the epicentre of the national worklessness crisis.
In the four years between March 2020 and March 2024, the employment rate in Pendle plunged from 74pc to 47.9pc – a fall of 26.1pc and the biggest drop recorded in any of the 329 local authorities across England and Wales, analysis shows.
The employment rate has recovered to 58.3pc 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 21.1pc, 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.
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.”
The Yes Hub is not just a job centre but also a youth club of sorts.
Around 40 young people come in every day. As well as hosting CV sessions and maths and English lessons, the hub also helps youngsters with job applications. Upstairs there is a table tennis table, boxing bags and a gaming room, while downstairs is a bike workshop.
The hub also organises trips to rock climbing and fishing, as well as arranging DJing sessions.
Marshall is trying to fill a gap left behind by lockdown. “Young people have not gone out and done what normal kids at that age do,” says Marshall. “Going out drinking in the park, getting into trouble.
“I hate coming back to the pandemic, the pandemic, the pandemic – but we still see the impact of it today.”
Losing the ability to socialise during Covid has taken a long-term toll on mental health and confidence, Marshall warns.
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 2.8m, according to the ONS.
Mental health is a major driver, and the change is particularly stark among the younger generation.
Any local 16 to 24-year-old who goes to the job centre is referred to the Yes Hub, where a case worker assesses what is holding them back before they start thinking about applications.
Some are too anxious to speak or make eye contact during their first meetings.
“The pandemic has caused a lot of anxiety, with schools and colleges being closed and moving to online learning,” says Mehvish Ashraf, another member of the team at the Yes Hub. “It’s almost like they have got used to that method of communication.”
Marshall notes how an 18-year-old was so anxious that her first meeting had to be held in her mum’s car outside. “Sometimes you can’t even mention the word ‘work’ because of their barriers,” he says. “It would tip them over the edge.
“Getting people to appointments, we more or less have to babysit them. That’s what we’re here to do.”
The loss of social skills has had a major impact on young people’s ability to secure work, says Haashir Khan, 19. “If you’re really charismatic in a job interview then they will take a liking to you and give you a chance,” he says.
Khan himself has a large, supportive family and enjoys judo, two things that he says have protected him from social isolation. But even he suffered from lockdown.
“It made me more like a turtle,” he says. “I was more in my shell.”
He also felt the effects on his education. Like Ali, he was in Year 10 when Covid hit. Before the pandemic, he wanted to go to university to become a journalist. But after lockdown, Khan’s education spiralled as he became overwhelmed with the pressures of college.
“You had mock tests, you had another set of mock tests, and then you had six weeks’ worth of mini-examinations,” he says. “And then I started college and had a bunch of tests all throughout the year.”
He dropped his hopes of becoming a journalist and, after finishing his A-levels, instead of going to university he went on Universal Credit.
However, he also got help from the Yes Hub and two months ago started an apprenticeship in marketing at a company called Star Print, where he hopes to get a permanent contract. This is one example of how local interventions can work.
Since it opened in 2021, 1,269 16 to 24-year-olds have been referred to the Pendle 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 160pc since 2020, with one in five children now “persistently absent” from the education system, according to the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ).
“I think potentially the value put on education has diminished,” says Richard Lee, the technical director at Serian, a tech company in Pendle.
Young people were previously told school was important and had to go. But Covid meant suddenly they no longer had to, says Lee. “That’s bled into even parents who now will be like ‘oh we’ll just take the kids out of school because it clearly doesn’t matter’,” he says.
This is the most worrying consequence of lockdown when considering the long-term impact on young people’s future employability, says Louise Murphy, a senior economist at the Resolution Foundation.
Young people with poor health and from deprived areas are far more likely to miss school, she says, adding: “Of course, that impacts their chances of getting qualifications and their future chances in the workforce.”
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.”
The pandemic seems to have made fewer people want to work, Lee adds, who argues that being on furlough made people more inclined to game the system and be signed off sick.
More than 40pc of workers in Pendle were furloughed, the 12th-highest rate in England and Wales, Telegraph analysis shows.
“I think it’s quite difficult – when you’ve sat on your bottom for six to 12 months doing nothing, sitting in the garden drinking Prosecco getting paid – to go back,” says Lee.
When scrutinising Pendle’s low employment rate, experts say it has not been caused by a lack of jobs, but rather a shortage of people with the required skills.
“The feedback we get is that we need more highly skilled people who are work-ready,” says Andrew Dewhurst, head of business engagement at Nelson and Colne College, which works with around 1,000 businesses through its apprenticeship and work experience programmes. “Demand is high.”
Dewhurst’s college has recently changed its curriculum to incorporate a new work-readiness programme in response to the pandemic. “It is about reinforcing some of those pretty basic things, but they are only basic if you know them – how to talk to people, how to dress, how to have a positive mental attitude,” says Dewhurst.
Serian’s own workforce has more than doubled since the pandemic and it now employs 43 people locally. But the company generally takes on apprentices and trains its own staff.
“I can teach them IT skills, but what I can’t teach is personality,” says Lee. “I can’t teach them how to be able to communicate with people and get customers to like them and also other members of staff.”
There is also the question of whether lockdown can explain the difference between Britain’s jobs market and other countries.
Although the UK did not have the most severe first lockdown, the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government’s Covid stringency index shows it was the only country in the G7 to have such a stringent second lockdown.
But the picture is mixed. The UK’s rapid vaccine rollout also meant it was able to unwind Covid measures quicker than in other developed countries.
Globally there is not a trend of countries with more stringent lockdowns seeing bigger jumps in economic inactivity, says Murphy, who claims that “other countries that had similar pandemic responses haven’t seen this up-tick”.
Instead, it seems the UK’s pre-existing problems meant the workforce was already vulnerable.
“A number of contributory factors were emerging before the pandemic but perhaps were either accelerated or revealed as really significant problems through the Covid period,” says Ben Harrison, director of the Work Foundation at Lancaster University.
For example, ill health was already surging before the pandemic. “Prescriptions for antidepressants were rising before the pandemic and things were bad already when it comes to young people’s mental health,” says Murphy.
This fed through to children struggling with anxiety or depression, who found going back to school after a period of closure particularly difficult.
Britain’s economy is still paying for lockdown in other ways. From a fiscal perspective, Covid sparked a huge surge in borrowing that remains a burden today.
The Chancellor recently laid bare the financial pressures in her recent Budget, although omitted to say how Covid played a part.
According to the latest figures, the UK will spend nearly £105bn on debt interest alone this year. This means the Government will spend nearly a fifth more financing its debt this year than it will spend on education.
Staggeringly, if debt interest costs were a government body, they would be second in funding only to the NHS.
All of which is diverting money away from Reeves’s attempt to “fix the foundations” of the UK economy.
Back in the Victorian era, Nelson was a heartland of the cotton industry.
“The industrial revolution was born in areas like this,” says Rose Rouse, the chief executive of Pendle borough council.
Today, manufacturing is still key and Rolls-Royce has a factory in Barnoldswick. But the days of mass employment in local factories are long gone.
George Evans, 26, lives in Colne and feels this loss keenly. He feels like he was born in the wrong decade “every single day of my life”.
Evans dropped out of college because he could not afford it. He has since worked a range of minimum wage jobs in shops and factories, muddling away at the sharp end of a local labour market that has little demand for unskilled workers.
“Getting a job around here is atrociously bad,” he says. “I must have applied for over 100 jobs in the last seven months. I wasn’t even bothered by what they were. I would literally do anything.”
There are more jobs in nearby Burnley, Preston and Manchester, but jobseekers in Pendle are held back by a lack of transport links. “You’d need a car to get a good job, and I can’t afford to drive,” says Evans, who has finally now found a job at a local retailer.
Even travel within Pendle is unreliable. There is one train every hour between Brierfield, Nelson and Colne, the three largest towns in the district.
Worse still, the M65 runs into Pendle but does not come out of it. It runs to a roundabout in Colne, which then joins a minor A road. “It just grinds to a halt in a car park because they never built the rest of the motorway going over to Yorkshire,” says Miranda Parker, the chief executive of the East Lancashire Chamber of Commerce.
The lack of transport links is a vicious cycle. Manufacturers cannot move freight effectively from Pendle so businesses are less likely to invest here, Parker adds.
High levels of economic inactivity can partly be explained by demographics. Census data show that the proportion of people who identify as Muslim in Pendle has climbed from 17.4pc to 26pc in the decade to 2021, nearly four times the national average.
In the 2021 census, people who identified as Muslim had the lowest employment rate amongst working-age adults in the UK, according to the ONS, which said it was because Muslim women were more likely to care for their families full-time. Muslim households also have a higher proportion of students living at home.
Rouse remains optimistic. The council is investing in rebuilding the shopping centre in Nelson, which she hopes will bring an economic boost.
“What we don’t want is to have a sort of parallel economy where you’ve got people with these high-value engineering jobs and then you’ve got other people who can’t be part of that world,” she says. “We’re moving in the right direction.”
The people of Pendle will also be hopeful that Labour can succeed in its pledge to get Britain back to work.
Details of how it will do so are expected in a white paper to be released by Liz Kendall, the Work and Pensions Secretary, this autumn.
McGovern also argues that Labour’s Employment Rights Bill, which is designed to end zero-hours contracts, along with its manifesto pledge to help all 18 to 21-year-olds find work, will make a difference.
“The current system has failed and that’s why we are bringing in the biggest reforms to employment support in a generation to unlock the talent of young people across the country,” she says.
But there is no expectation there will be any more money. Reeves committed in her Budget to maintain the £3bn in savings from Tory plans for benefit reforms, even if Labour will make them in a different way.
Yet recognising the impact of lockdown could be a positive start for the Chancellor, particularly as youngsters in places like Pendle grow ever more reliant on specialist local support and their own resolve.
While Ali was able to get back on his feet after the setbacks of lockdown, his experience is an all-too-rare success story.
“My thought process was that I don’t want to be remembered as someone who’s good for nothing,” he says.
“I want to be the type of person who comes from nothing, has no family on their side, and then turns into something.”

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