O n a Wednesday night in Hastings, a handful of under-18s gather in the back of a former newspaper building for a weekly Dungeons and Dragons night. Around the table, a teenager peers from behind a floppy fringe, telling the other players of a monster with jaws wide enough to swallow a man whole. Behind him, two boys are playing pool.
For the moment, there’s not an iPhone in sight. Sidney Ewing, the youth worker overseeing the programme, says the majority of young people who come to the centre feel uncertain about their future. Their most popular night is for 16-to-18s, she says, a generation who lost two critical years of their education to Covid, with only screens for school and socialising.
“A lot of them say they aren’t ready to go to university or start work because of their mental health,” she says. “You hear that a lot: ‘I need to sort myself out first.’” Britain is suffering from an epidemic of people too ill to work.
Economic inactivity due to ill health has been increasing for five years in the longest sustained rise since the 1990s, and now stands at a record high of 2.8 million . Addressing this will be one of the biggest challenges for the next government and a central economic question for parties on the election campaign trail.
There are now 700,000 more people unable to work through illness than before Covid. Nine-tenths of that rise can be accounted for by two groups: the oldest in the labour market, and the very young. View image in fullscree.
