“We must get Britain working again,” the UK’s new chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng said last week. He is right. It would help the country’s inflation problem and its growth problem if more people joined the labour market. Yet inactivity — the term economists give to people who are neither working nor looking for work — is on the rise. It’s worth dwelling for a moment on how new this is for Britain’s labour market. In the decade after the financial crisis of 2009, the UK became a more industrious place. The proportion of 16 to 64-year-olds who were inactive fell from about 23 per cent in 2009 to 20 per cent by 2019, the lowest since records began in 1971. Older people retired later and more women joined the workforce. The employment rate for mothers in couples rose over 5 percentage points between 2008 and 2019. It also became more common for single parents to work when their children were young, partly because of changes to welfare rules.

This growth in the size of the labour force was partly about benefit rules and changing social norms. But it was also about money. The UK was going through a lost decade for real wage growth that left people poorer than they had expected to be. As the Resolution Foundation think-tank put it in a report on these trends in 2019: “feel poor, work more.”

Now inactivity has climbed back up to 21.7 per cent. Of the 640,000 or so working-age people who have become inactive since the start of the pandemic, 55 per cent of them say they are long-term sick (the other big group are students, which is less of a worry).