The rate of economic change in Britain and other advanced western countries is going to pick up over the coming decade. Brexit, net zero, levelling up and new technologies all mean we are going to have to work in new jobs and in new ways. But as we emerge from the pandemic, we have seen how poorly prepared we are for these big changes. Younger workers have piled back into work more quickly than we feared, but they have returned to the same relatively low-paid and low-skilled sectors—leisure, hospitality, retail—which they were in before. The pandemic has not prompted a “jobs and skills reset” for them.
The pandemic has also turned out badly for older workers, some of whom have left the labour force entirely. Resolution Foundation research shows that the employment of men in their fifties fell from 84 per cent before the Covid crisis, bottoming out at 81 per cent in January- March 2021, before rising to 82 per cent in April-June 2021. Women in their fifties did even worse. About 140,000 over-fifties who were working before the pandemic are now unemployed or completely disengaged from the labour market.