Professor Sir Ian Diamond said he was “very confident” that the UK was suffering from a rise in health-related economic inactivity, despite question marks about the quality of the data.
Diamond, the UK’s national statistician, said that work from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) on health-related inactivity “hangs together” with a range of other figures from Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the NHS, which point to higher inactivity due to ill health.
According to the ONS, the number of people who are economically inactive due to ill-health has increased to 2.8m people, up from 2.1m in the final quarter of 2019.
“What we have reported, and what we stay with, is an increase in inactivity linked – not always, but often – to mental ill health amongst young people,” Diamond said.
He said there had also been a “flight from the labour force” among over-50s, due to the increasing prevalence of cardiovascular, musculoskeletal and mental health conditions.
But the ONS has suffered from falling response rates to its flagship labour force survey, the source of data for employment, unemployment and inactivity in the economy.
Independent research from the Resolution Foundation, published last November, suggested that as many as 900,000 more people were in employment than the official figures imply, meaning the employment rate would be in line with its pre-pandemic level.
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Huw Pill, chief economist at the Bank of England, has suggested that the Bank’s own work on the topic suggests inactivity has remained fairly constant.
Asked how he could be so confident in the inactivity figures despite wider issues with the survey, Diamond replied: “Please, please, please don’t think I am being complacent. I lie awake at night worrying about this the whole time”.
He explained that the Resolution Foundation’s work started from a different population base to the one that the ONS were using at the time.
“It’s a bit like trying to compare Torquay United with Manchester City: Its not a very sensible comparison,” he said.
The think tank’s work also made assumptions about self-employment and people out of work, assumptions which Diamond said it would be inappropriate for the ONS to make.
“We do not believe that a national statistics institute should be making bold assumptions about that,” he said.
