Record number of people not looking for work because of long-term illnesses
11 October 2022, 16:09
A record number of people in the UK are not looking for work because of a long-term illness, new figures show.
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Data from the Office for National Statistics shows that the 'economic inactivity rate' - people of working age who are not in work or looking for a job - from June to August this year was at nearly 22%, up more than 6% from before the Covid-19 pandemic.
The number of people who are inactive because of a long-term illness hit nearly 2.5 million.
It comes as the unemployment rate fell to 3.5% in the same period - the lowest for almost 50 years.
"We're not always about our purposefulness"
ONS head of labour market and household statistics David Freeman said: "The number of people neither working nor looking for work continues to rise, with those who say this is because they're long-term sick reaching a record level.
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"While the number of job vacancies remains high after its long period of rapid growth, it has now dropped back a little, with a number of employers telling us they've reduced recruitment due to a variety of economic pressures.
"There's been a very skewed distribution of the growth"
"However, because unemployment is also down, there continues to be more vacancies than unemployed people."
A caller told LBC's Shelagh Fogarty on Tuesday that her ME and fibromyalgia - both chronic conditions - had made her think: "Okay, what's today going to hit me with and what can I do around that?
It's 'constant fear' living on benefits
"Every day's very different - I see it like a bag of revels, you never know which is going to come out, and in my case it's heavily stacked with coffee."
The ONS figures also show that pay continues to fail to keep pace with cost of living increases driven by inflation.
Homeless caller living off Universal Credit of £143 a month
Although the unemployment rate dropped to its lowest level since 1974, economists had predicted that the rate would stay steady at 3.6%, the rate it hit during the previous quarter.
Meanwhile, the number of UK workers on payrolls rose by 69,000 between August and September to 29.7 million.
