Huge rise in young people off work driven by mental health issues

However, the extent of the increase in sickness in the young has been masked by a “huge” fall in the numbers of women who are looking after families full-time, official data shows.

A decade ago, 250,100 women aged 16 to 24 were not working because they were looking after families, but the figure has fallen to 93,900 this year. Over the same period, the number of women of this age who are long-term sick has more than doubled from 52,000 to 117,600, Times analysis of Office for National Statistics figures shows.

Even in 2019 there were 153,200 women aged 16-24 looking after family, more than double the 71,000 long-term sick, but after a post-Covid surge in illness the figures crossed over last year.

Among men of the same age, one in ten are now classed as long-term sick. Sickness absence among 16-24 year-old men has increased from 78,500 a decade ago to 141,100 this year.

Only 24,400 young men do not work because they are looking after families, although this is double the 11,700 a decade ago.

Louise Murphy, senior economist at the Resolution Foundation think tank, said that it was “probably good news that fewer people are out of work to care for family”, allowing more women to work.

However, she said: “There is this worrying trend of more young people not being in education or work because of ill health — that’s doubled in the past decade.”

Despite ministers’ desire to get such young people back to work, just 25 per cent of the long-term sick in this age group say they want a job, the ONS finds.

Murphy said: “Youth unemployment is fairly low in historic terms, so the rise in ill health is the most important thing driving the rise [in inactivity]. Certainly some people think it’s plausible that those things are related — maybe people who a decade ago may have ended up unemployed for whatever reason, be it changes to the benefits system or cultural norms, are now presenting as economically inactive.”

Ministers are drawing up reforms to the benefits system designed to encourage more people back to work, after acknowledging that the cost of sickness benefits is unsustainable. Spending on such benefits has reached £65 billion and is projected to top £100 billion by the end of the decade — more than schools and police combined.

• Sick or slack? The scale of the employment crisis in charts

Reforms are due in the new year, after a back-to-work plan in November offered a “youth guarantee” of help finding work or training to all those aged 18-21.

Official figures recently showed 946,000 young people aged 16-24 were not in education, employment or training, the highest “Neet” figure since 2014.

Among women of this age, the inactivity rate has held steady at about 21-22 per cent for the past three decades, even as the reasons for it have changed.

“The falling number of young women who are inactive to care for family/home is huge and does mask the other inactivity trends,” Murphy said. However, she said that it was “hard to see” how numbers looking after families would fall much further. “There will always be some young people, mainly women, looking after small children. At the same time inactivity due to long-term sickness is continuing to rise.”

Murphy said that mental health problems were a key driver of rising sickness in the young. “Forty-two per cent of young people who were workless due to ill health stated that a mental health problem was their main problem — more than any other single category,” she said. This is up from 31 per cent a decade ago.

Surveys by the ONS have struggled with low response rates since the pandemic, prompting complaints from the Bank of England among others about their reliability.

Murphy said this meant that “the more recent figures are uncertain. But that doesn’t change the broad picture, as the long-term trends dating from before this issue show a very clear story among young people, of falling inactivity for caring reasons and rising inactivity due to sickness, with the gender breakdown being notable.”

She added that data from the benefits system corroborated the trend “as health-related claims continue to rise among young people”.

Christopher Rocks, lead economist at the Health Foundation think tank, said that in addition to a falling birth rate, the rise in the proportion of mothers working had been “quite considerable”, arguing that success in helping women with children stay in their jobs offered hope for dealing with the rise in sickness.

Surveys run by the ONS have struggled with low response rates since the pandemic

GETTY IMAGES

“There has been a systemic approach to increasing parental employment through policies like childcare provision, but we haven’t seen the same focus on work and health. If you had the same consistency on the health side, the success of dealing with the barriers to work for parents over the years does show there is room to make significant improvement,” he said.

“We have seen signs of a rise in mental health challenges which are often complex, but in addressing them it’s important not to over-medicalise problems where inappropriate and to also focus on the practical barriers that people face and often exacerbate their conditions — so things like the quality of work, issues with caring, financial pressures and so on,” Rocks said.

He advised ministers to look at the benefits system to ensure that it “pays for people to move into work”, saying bosses should improve offers of flexible working to keep staff in their jobs.

Policy success hid health woes

A generation ago, the big concern about the young was teenage pregnancy. However, success in tackling that problem has perhaps made Britain slow to pick up on another emerging crisis — the extent of sickness absence among those who have barely started in life.

Of course, a big reason why young women are looking after children less is that they are having fewer of them. Partly this is a policy success — intensive efforts on contraception and relationship education saw conception rates for under-18s fall from 44 per 1,000 in the 1990s to 13 today — and partly a consequence of Britain’s declining fertility and trend for starting families later. Even those younger women who do have children are more likely to be working now as a result of government efforts to encourage them back to the workforce.

• Sickness benefits reform will get people back to work, Labour vows

But the worrying trend is the rising numbers of young people saying they cannot work due to long-term sickness. While this trend is seen in all ages, the fastest rises are in the young, with mental health problems given as the biggest single reason. Tens of thousands of people a year now go straight from studying to being economically inactive because of sickness.

The role of social media, economic stagnation, austerity, incentives in the benefits system to be signed off sick, the growing social willingness to conceive of problems of mental health issues — all have been suggested as reasons and the balance between them is hotly debated.

The consequences, however, are not in doubt. In addition to the waste of human potential, the ballooning cost of sickness and resulting lack of workers threatens the government’s hopes for both public services and economic growth.

Ministers are promising action. But it is not obvious that they have a clear diagnosis of the problem, let alone the political will to make drastic changes in an area that tends to provoke fierce resistance from Labour’s base.