Christina Barratt was used to 12 to 14 hour days. For many years she got into her car every morning and headed to department stores and other retailers across North West England to sell greeting cards for a major manufacturer.
“It’s a very demanding, busy job,” she said, remembering how to sell, manage client accounts and grow the business, often traveling long distances.
In March 2020, at the age of 50, Mrs. Barratt contracted Covid. She has not been able to work since then.
Ms Barratt is one of 3.5 million people – or about one in 12 adults of working age in Britain – who have long-term health problems and are neither working nor looking for work. The numbers exploded during the first two years of the pandemic, when more than half a million people reported being chronically ill, with physical and mental health problems, according to analysis by Bank of England economists. The sharp rise in ill health is a surprising problem in its own right, but there is also growing awareness in Britain about the negative effects on the economy of so many people being unable to work.
Illness adds to a growing sense of malaise in a country wracked by high inflation and the economic costs of Brexit, where the National Health Service is overwhelmed and workers across sectors are striking in increasing numbers after a year of severe political upheaval.
With the unemployment rate approaching a half-century low, companies have lamented that they have not been able to hire enough workers, leaving the government wrestling with how to expand the labor market.
Before the pandemic, a growing labor market was “the only growth cylinder in the economic engine,” Andy Haldane, the former chief economist of the Bank of England, said in November at a talk at the Health Foundation, a non-profit organization. It “has now gone into reverse gear.”
Britain is in “a situation where health and well-being are declining for the first time, probably since the industrial revolution,” and are holding back economic growth, said Mr. Haldane, who is currently the CEO of the Royal Society of Arts, a London-based organization that seeks practical solutions to social issues.
The economy is likely already in recession, according to forecasts from the Bank of England and others, and is expected to return to meager growth in 2024. Some economists have warned that labor shortages could exacerbate the cost-of-living crisis if it causes employers to raise wages to attract workers in a way that threatens to entrench high inflation in the economy. That could prompt the central bank to keep interest rates high, drive up borrowing costs and slow down the economy.
At the heart of the problem is a high rate of economic inactivity that has barely eased despite the end of pandemic lockdowns, huge demand for labor and a high cost of living. More than half a million people were counted as inactive as of October than before the pandemic, according to the Office for National Statistics. In a separate study looking at data for the first two years of the pandemic, Jonathan Haskel and Josh Martin, economists at the Bank of England, found that nearly 90 percent of the increase in economic inactivity could be attributed to people experiencing long-term illness.
The extent to which illness forces people to leave the workforce is still debated among researchers in Britain, as the reasons for not working can change over time. But there is little disagreement about the fact that the economy is held back by so many people saying that ill health prevents them from working.
Contributing to the rise in the number of illnesses are not only the tens of thousands of cases of long-term Covid, which Mrs Barratt is suffering from, but also a huge backlog of people – around seven million – with a variety of health problems who are on waiting lists for mental health care . The latest figures contribute to a longer-term trend. In the 25 years before the pandemic, the number of people with long-term illness grew by about half a percent per year. It has since accelerated to 4 percent a year, according to the study by Mr. Haskel and Mr. Martin.
The UK’s aging population means there are more sick people, but “the prevalence of ill health has also increased”, said David Finch of the Health Foundation, which has studied links between illness and economic inactivity. In recent years, the foundation noted, there has been a large increase in the number of people with cardiovascular disease, mental illness and a host of other conditions, including respiratory disease and long-term Covid symptoms.
Britain is one of only seven countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development that still have higher levels of economic inactivity than before the pandemic, the Office for National Statistics reported. The United States is also part of this group, but most of them are the missing workers explained by retirement and a decline in the participation of middle-aged men without college degrees, rather than by illness. The increase in the rate of economic inactivity in Britain is more than twice the increase in the United States.
These missing workers face a number of barriers to returning to work. For some, the severity of their health condition prevents them from working, while others are unable to return to the work they used to do.
Ms. Barratt, the greeting card saleswoman, has no illusions about returning to a similar job.
“I could never play a role like that again,” said Ms Barratt. “I’m just not good enough to maintain any energy level.” Just going up and down the stairs at home is a challenge, she said.
She feels the pressure of having to live off the government for more than two years and is eager to get back to work. “If I keep having this condition, which can fluctuate in severity, I should find a job that is very flexible,” she added.
While there has been a worrying increase in the number of the economically inactive – sick or not – who do not want to work, there are still 1.7 million people who do, but are unable to find and get a job quickly. work, according to the Bureau of National Statistics.
“This has been a long-standing problem of keeping people with disabilities in the workplace,” says Kirsty Stanley, an occupational therapist.
There are many challenges, including some employers who do not understand the legal requirements to make reasonable accommodations for employees with health problems, said Mrs. Stanley. She is an associate of Long Covid Work, a group working with unions and labor groups to improve access to work for people with lung Covid. Mr. Haskel and Mr. Martin estimate that there are 96,000 people economically inactive due to the long Covid.
Ms Stanley, who also suffers from long-term Covid, said one problem was that the gradual return to work period that employers offered people after long absences was not working well for those with long-term Covid.
“They basically expect people to go from potential zero to 100 in four to six weeks,” she said. “What happens is people crash.”
Just over two years ago, Michael Borlase went back to work in a phased four weeks after falling ill with Covid. But at the end of the period, after returning to an eight-hour shift, he fell ill again and was unable to return to work.
He was a newly graduated nurse who worked in a psychiatric ward for men with mental health problems who committed a crime. He was only there for eight months before contracting Covid in April 2020.
“I had been so poor as a student nurse for so long,” he said. “I loved working, working for the NHS and was very proud of the work I did. And then Covid hit.”
“I was very early in my career,” he added. “And now I don’t know if I can ever go back.”
At age 36, he said he felt “stuck in a professional limbo”, where he couldn’t do the job he had been training for for years, but was too unwell to train for anything else. Until September, Mr Borlase received full pay due to a provision for NHS workers with Covid. Since then, Mr. Borlase has been receiving reduced sick pay, which expires in April.
Delays in getting medical treatment have made it difficult for Andrea Slivkova, 43, to return to work. She was born in the Czech Republic and came to Great Britain 10 years ago. She left her job as a cleaner in mid-2021 due to pain from a prolapsed pelvic organ. It took more than a year for her to have the surgery to address the problem. Since then, she said, she’s still not well but hasn’t been able to get a follow-up appointment with a specialist. Last summer she was told it would be a five-month wait.
“They told me that the waiting list is long because there are other people waiting too,” said Ms. Slivkova, along with her daughter, Kristyna Dudyova, who translated from Czech.
Mrs. Slivkova still hasn’t returned to work. She described the strain of having a physical health condition, as well as the struggle to navigate the healthcare system and the financial stress of relying on government benefits.
Ms. Dudyova recalled how her mother was a workaholic, finding time to bake, go to the gym, and hold multiple jobs when necessary, while raising her and her younger brother.
“But now everything is just gone,” she said.
