The UK’s workforce is shrinking at the fastest rate in four decades, costing the economy £25 billion a year and adding £16 billion of fiscal pressure to the public finances, according to a study of Britain’s missing-worker problem.
A two-year analysis into the state of the workforce has found that 800,000 people have fallen out of the labour market since the Covid-19 pandemic, the largest employment drop since the 1980s, marking out the UK as having one of the worst economic inactivity problems in the developed world.
The findings from the Commission on the Future of Employment Support said the 1.5 percentage point decline in employment since the pandemic has cost the economy £25 billion a year and added fiscal pressures worth £16 billion a