Number Of Young Adults Off Work Due To Illness Has Doubled

Economic inactivity among 18 to 24-year-olds due to illness has nearly doubled over the past decade, according to research.

According to The Times:

Most of those involved are struggling with education, with four in five of the young people who are too ill to work having qualifications only at GCSE level or below, the Resolution Foundation think tank said.

It said that the “worrying trend” had gone completely under the radar. Its study, funded by the Health Foundation charity, said that overall levels of worklessness among young people were low.

Earlier this year the number of young people not in education, employment or training (known as Neets) stood at 720,000, below the post-financial crisis peak of 1.1 million.

There was a near-doubling of the number of young people not working because of ill-health, from 94,000 in 2012 to 185,000 in 2022, the report found. Almost one in four young people not in work were inactive because of ill health, compared with fewer than one in ten in 2012.

Louise Murphy, an economist at the think tank, said: “Overall worklessness among young people is currently low but beneath this welcome headline trend lies a worrying rise in the number of young people who are not working due to ill-health.

“Worklessness due to ill-health among young people is most common in small towns and villages but reflects these young people’s low levels of education far more than the nature of their area.

This highlights the protective effect that education can have on a person’s ability to access mental health support and to succeed in the labour market.

“We cannot afford to let young people who are workless due to health problems get left behind so we need both to improve their education opportunities and to ensure that everyone has access to better mental health support.”

Official figures show that between January and March this year 2.55 million people were not working because of illness, with about 400,000 suffering long-term sickness. Half the rise was among people aged 50 to 64.

It has added billions of pounds to the government’s spending on benefits and has been blamed on the NHS backlog, including delays in GP appointments, as well as long Covid.

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