So they’re not ill; they just don’t feel like working any more. That is the conclusion from an analysis by the House of Lords’ Economic Affairs Committee, which argues that the British labour force has shrunk not primarily because of long Covid or other sickness, but because of middle-aged people retiring early.
The UK stands almost alone in the developed world in failing to reverse Covid’s impact on the supply of workers. The proportion of working-age people willing to work has gone down and it’s still falling. Almost everywhere else, the “economic activity rate”, as it’s called, has recovered.
For months, the dominant theory has been that illness is the primary cause. The surveys all show a rise in people citing it as their main reason for not working. But closer interrogation of the data has shown that the rise in illness is almost entirely among people who had already stopped working. So Britain’s health might be ailing but that isn’t the cause of the worker shortage.