How lazy Britons became a threat to the economy

Telegraph

13-05-2025

Finding a job in Britain in the current market is not easy, but one sector still has plenty of work to go around: social care.
'There are 130,000 vacancies in the sector,' says Geoff Butcher, who runs several care homes in the Midlands. 'I honestly don't know how they are going to be filled.'
Labour thinks it has found a solution: push businesses such as care home operators to train up the growing ranks of workless Britons.
Announcing a crackdown on migration on Tuesday, Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, said the Government was ending 'what was effectively a free market experiment on immigration – encouraging employers to recruit from abroad, loosening controls in different areas but without any requirement to tackle skills and labour shortages here at home'.
Employers will now only be able to recruit overseas workers in limited circumstances and will need to provide a plan to train up more British workers if they do so. The system is meant to encourage businesses to turn to home-grown workers to fill skills gaps over the longer-term, with foreign staff used as a stopgap.
But observers like Butcher are sceptical.
'It's no good the Government saying, 'Well, we've got X million economically inactive people, and they've got to get back to work,'' he says. 'The health sector is not somewhere where you can have people who are forced to work and they really don't want to do it.'
Most UK job applicants never turn up for interviews, he says. The few who do end up failing probation or quit in the first three months.
'The majority of them just find it too hard work,' Butcher says.
Cooper and Sir Keir Starmer face an awkward truth: many British workers cannot or will not do jobs that foreigners desperate to earn money are happily queuing up to do. These include crucial roles such as helping elderly people, building houses or staffing hospitals.
Figures released on Tuesday by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show economic inactivity among UK-born people has risen since the pandemic, while it has fallen among those who were born overseas but now live here.
Some 21.8pc of UK nationals are economically inactive, up from 20.4pc before the pandemic. By contrast, the figure for those from abroad has fallen from 20.7pc to 18.5pc over the same period.
A closer look at the figures shows this has been driven by a plunge in the inactivity rate among those coming to the UK from outside of the EU. The rate has dropped from 29.2pc to 21.3pc, while the EU rate is largely unchanged at 14.7pc.
The rise in economic activity among British workers since Covid has sparked alarm for both ministers and policymakers.
While the classification of ineconomic activity can cover people studying and those who have retired early, the rise has been fuelled by a surge in the number of people claiming sickness benefits since Covid. There has been a wave of mostly younger people describing themselves as too depressed or anxious to work, while older workers blame back pain for keeping them out of work.
Four million 16 to 64-year-olds across England and Wales now claim disability or incapacity benefits, up from 2.8m in 2019.
Louise Murphy at the Resolution Foundation, a think tank, cautions that the ONS's data are notoriously unreliable. However, she says: 'When we think about economic inactivity, it's definitely not a problem around non-UK-born workers.'
She adds: 'Given that we have made it easier for people to come linked to employment, you would expect that to show up in the labour market data. Some of it also just reflects demographics: we've got more younger non-UK-born people compared to older UK-born adults.'
Benefits to blame
Could more training for economically inactive Britons help shift the dial? Those at the coalface are sceptical.
'I think the benefit system is a large part of the problem,' says Butcher. 'Quite a few of them come from families where their parents have lived on benefits, either in whole or in part, for the vast majority of their lives. So it is to an extent a culture. It's a way of life, kind of bumping along the bottom, and being able to do that knowing that the state ultimately will step in and provide a safety net.'
The wages on offer are simply not worth it for many of those already on benefits. Meanwhile, the sector struggles to pay more because funding from local authorities is not keeping up with costs, including the £25bn rise in employers' National Insurance contributions and recent inflation-busting minimum wage jumps.
'For what they're going to earn, they could lose their housing allowance,' says Nadra Ahmed, chairman of the National Care Association. 'They can lose other benefits, and it won't match up. Also people want to choose the hours that they work. We are a 24-hour service.'
When a care job is advertised to British workers 'it's just tumbleweed', she says.
'Very rarely do we get responses. I had somebody say they had 48 responses from a job centre advert. Ten people actually responded to their response. Two people came for an interview and left the job within two weeks.'
Risk to growth
In theory, this should be the best time to restrict access to foreign labour given the slowdown in the job market. Vacancies are at their lowest level since the start of 2017 outside of Covid, at 761,000.
Meanwhile, unemployment has edged up to 4.5pc, the highest since summer 2021 although still low by historical standards. On Reddit, UK job forums are full of posts from despairing young people struggling to find work. Desperate times could prompt many to rethink what they are willing to do.
However, there are still sectors struggling to plug gaps because British workers won't fill them. They include farming, construction, transport and hospitality, 'where roles tend to be lower-paid and harder to fill', says Jonathan Steenberg, an economist at credit insurer Coface.
'Around one in 10 UK businesses still cite labour shortages as a concern, and further curbs on immigration risk making this worse,' he adds.
Such shortages of willing workers threaten to undermine the Government's growth ambitions, he warns, pointing out that the construction industry Labour is depending on to build 1.5m new homes this parliament is already plagued by 'chronic shortages'.
'Although vacancies are now more than half a million below their pandemic peak, firms tell us recruitment remains a huge challenge,' says Jane Gratton, at the British Chambers of Commerce. 'They are still struggling to find people with the skills they need.'
Whether it is low wages, a broken benefit system or something else that is to blame, bosses fear they will have a hard time getting by without foreign workers. While there are millions of Britons sitting on the sidelines of the jobs market, many seem unwilling to do the work the country needs.