‘Quite often there is a stigma attached to going to work’: Inside Britain’s labour market crisis
Michael is fair haired and frail, with a face that tells a story. Until seven years ago his life was perhaps as he imagined it. He was married and working for a fancy food shop in his home town in north Yorkshire.
Then something happened. He is reluctant to share the full details but his marriage broke down, he lost the job, and was left with a choice: “It was to be homeless, or move to a bedsit in Middlesbrough,” he says.
Which is how we come to be speaking in the Employment Hub on Corporation Road, opposite Middlesbrough’s Jobcentre.
A council-backed centre, it offers help and guidance to anyone looking to get back into work.
Young adults making the leap from education to employment; older people who want or need to earn again; and clients like Michael, who fall somewhere in between, derailed by illness or personal circumstances.
‘I’ve lost my confidence’
He has not worked for six years and he’s here to try to change that. “With not being in work for a while I’ve lost my confidence,” he says.
“I got stuck in a routine and I’m not the best at helping myself out at times. You feel like you’re stuck. It would be nice to get back into a work routine. You feel better in yourself through having a job.”
Michael has an appointment with Doug Hewitson, once long-term unemployed himself. He points clients towards an array of services they might need to help them work, from compiling a CV and getting basic qualifications, to training and work experience opportunities.
“We primarily work with retirees, the short-term sick and people with young families, that tends to be with children younger than two,” Doug says. “Generally, they will be on a type of universal credit that doesn’t have the requirement to seek work attached to it. And we have a lot of them.”
50 Futures business development officer Doug Hewitson
The Employment Hub is trying to help fill a gap that exists across the country as the economy struggles with a labour market crisis that has nothing to do with the number of jobs.
Unlike the unemployment crisis of the 1980s, there are plenty of opportunities, close to a million vacancies at the most recent count. The problem is finding people to fill them.
Since the pandemic almost 800,000 people have fallen out of employment into “economic inactivity”, a catch-all definition that covers the nine million people of working age not currently able or looking to work.
That includes students, early retirees and stay-at-home parents and carers, but the largest and most pernicious reason is long-term sickness, which now accounts for more than 2.5 million people, an increase of more than 400,000 since COVID, driven largely by mental health conditions.
‘There is a stigma attached to going to work’
That has held back growth and pushed the welfare bill up, and the issue has gained political salience with Rishi Sunak characterising some mental health challenges as “the ups and downs of everyday life”.
Unemployment, inactivity and workless households are all above the national average in Middlesbrough and the Tees Valley but they are not unique.
“You can walk out on the High Street now and find several people who are economically inactive,” says Philip Bentham, who leads the employability team at housing association Thirteen in Stockton-on-Tees, which aims to help people into work.
“For some it’s health, mental health, low skills and qualifications, or generational unemployment. We’re working with families who are three and four generations unemployed within the household, mum and dad and grandparents that have never worked.
“Quite often there is a stigma attached to going to work. Their families are afraid of not having the safety net of the benefits system, and people sometimes sadly think work doesn’t pay. Our job is to convince them there is always something they can do.”
Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge
The state response to worklessness is Universal Credit, a single payment that covers benefits for housing, children and childcare, as well as unemployment benefit, administered by the Jobcentre Plus network.
At Middlesbrough’s Corporation Road branch a steady stream of claimants arrive for their strict 10-minute appointments, watched by up to four security guards.
A mix of carrot and stick
In principle it’s a deal between the state and the claimant, a mix of carrot and stick. Claimants who can work are required to attend weekly meetings with a work coach and take steps to find a job. Fail to do this and you can be “sanctioned”, often by reducing cash payments.
If you are too sick to work however the requirement to look for a job falls away leading to the suspicion, apparently shared by the prime minister, that some claimants are citing mental health conditions to get signed off.
I ask work coach Michaela Fulleylove if some people do play the system.
“I’m saying yes, definitely. But we have to treat every individual with trust, fairness and compassion.
“But we have to be able to ask questions, because not only is it our job to support the public, we’ve also got to protect the public purse.”
For all the challenges in Middlesbrough and the Tees Valley there are opportunities.
The demise of ICI and British Steel, huge paternal employers that offered their own safety net, left a gap that has never been adequately filled.
The latest attempt is levelling up, largely channelled through the Tees Valley mayoralty of Ben Houchen.
Louise Croce, AV Dawson people and culture director
Europe’s largest brownfield development, the controversial Teesworks freeport, is taking shape and there are advanced manufacturing opportunities in the renewable energy industry serving a huge new offshore wind project at Dogger Bank.
Thousands of jobs are promised, an incentive for the workforce and a challenge for employers.
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
AV Dawson has operated the Port of Middlesbrough in the shadow of the town’s landmark Transporter Bridge for 80 years.
They employ around 200 staff and people and culture director Louise Croce tells me they have no problem filling roles or retaining staff.
‘We get people who want to be hairdressers applying to be forklift truck drivers’
She points out the perverse incentives of a benefits system that requires claimants to apply for jobs, irrespective of whether they can do them.
“We get people who want to be hairdressers applying to be forklift truck drivers. You do question whether some of it’s around their ability to claim benefits,” she says.
But those who do work for her receive a level of support, particularly around mental health, that would have been unimaginable in Middlesbrough’s macho industrial past.
“We provide a lot of support inside the company, we have health and well being ambassadors, because mental health is such an issue in the area. We try and look after people, help them with issues early, before they become a problem.”
Professor Mark Simpson, deputy vice chancellor at Teesside University
On the edge of a city centre abandoned by big retailers is Teesside University, a cluster of new buildings that is evidence of badly needed investment.
The vast majority of the 20,000 students come from within a five mile radius, and deputy vice chancellor Professor Mark Simpson tells me they aim to prepare them for the promised jobs, from digital and AI, health and life sciences, public sector jobs and the net zero industries.
“We work with businesses and we work with industry to look at demands, look at what skill sets they need from our graduates,” he says. “But we don’t just respond, through those clusters of courses we help create the industries.”
“But when you see the levels of deprivation across the Tees Valley a big part of what we need to do is raise aspiration.”
An arms race for artificial intelligence (AI) supremacy, triggered by recent panic over Chinese chatbot DeepSeek, risks amplifying the existential dangers of superintelligence, according to one of the “godfathers” of AI.
Canadian machine learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, author of the first International AI Safety Report to be presented at an international AI summit in Paris next week, warns unchecked investment in computational power for AI without oversight is dangerous.
“The effort is going into who’s going to win the race, rather than how do we make sure we are not going to build something that blows up in our face,” Mr Bengio says.
He warns that military and economic races “result in cutting corners on ethics, cutting corners on responsibility and on safety. It’s unavoidable”.
Mr Bengio worked on neural networks and machine learning, the software architecture that underpins modern AI models.
He is in London, along with other AI pioneers to receive the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, the most prestigious global award for engineering, in recognition of AI and its potential.
He’s enthusiastic about its benefits for society, but the pivot away from AI regulation by Donald Trump‘s White House and frantic competition among big tech companies for more powerful AI models is a worrying shift.
‘Superhuman systems becoming more powerful’
“We are building systems that are more and more powerful; becoming superhuman in some dimensions,” he says.
“As these systems become more powerful, they also become extraordinarily more valuable, economically speaking.
“So the magnitude of, ‘wow, this is going to make me a lot of money’ is motivating a lot of people. And of course, when you want to sell products, you don’t want to talk about the risks.”
But not all the “godfathers” of AI are so concerned.
Take Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist, also in London to share in the QEPrize.
Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI scientist
“We have been deluded into thinking that large language models are intelligent, but really, they’re not,” he says.
“We don’t have machines that are nearly as smart as a house cat, in terms of understanding the physical world.”
Within three to five years, Mr LeCun predicts, AI will have some aspects of human-level intelligence. Robots, for example, that can perform tasks they’ve not been programmed or trained to do.
Read more:
What is DeepSeek? The low-cost Chinese AI firm that has turned the tech world upside down
Bill Gates says he would be diagnosed with autism if he was young today
But, he argues, rather than make the world less safe, open-source AI models such as DeepSeek – a chatbot developed by a Chinese company that rivals the best of America’s big tech with a tenth of the computing power – demonstrates no one will dominate for long.
“If the US decides to clam up when it comes to AI for geopolitical reasons, or, commercial reasons, then you’ll have innovation someplace else in the world. DeepSeek showed that,” he says.
The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering prize is awarded each year to engineers whose discoveries have, or promise to have, the greatest impact on the world.
Previous recipients include the pioneers of photovoltaic cells in solar panels, wind turbine technology and neodymium magnets found in hard drives, and electric motors.
Science minister Lord Vallance, who chairs the QEPrize foundation, says he is alert to the potential risks of AI.
Organisations such as the UK’s new AI Safety Institute are designed to foresee and prevent the potential harms AI “human-like” intelligence might bring.
Science minister Lord Vallance
But he is less concerned about one nation or company having a monopoly on AI.
“I think what we’ve seen in the last few weeks is it’s much more likely that we’re going to have many companies in this space, and the idea of single-point dominance is rather unlikely,” he says.
The Treasury Select Committee has sent a formal notice to HM Revenue & Customs demanding answers to critical questions about how it has been enforcing trade sanctions on Russia, following a Sky News investigation into the government department.
Last month Sky News reported that while HMRC had issued six fines in relation to sanction-breaking since 2022, it would not name the firms sanctioned or provide any further detail on what they did wrong. HMRC also admitted it had no idea how many investigations it was currently carrying out into sanction-breaking.
The admissions raised questions about the robustness of Britain’s trade sanctions regime, described by government ministers as the toughest in British history.
Money blog: Now we know why Guinness tastes worse in the UK
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
How robust are UK-Russia sanctions?
While the UK has introduced rules preventing the export of certain goods to Russia, banned items are still flowing into the country via third countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Some suspect that part of the reason these flows continue is that HMRC is not enforcing the rules as robustly as it could be.
Following Sky News’ investigation, the chair of the Treasury Select Committee (TSC), Dame Meg Hiller, has written a letter to the chief executive of HMRC, Sir Jim Harra, with 10 questions about HMRC’s conduct in the enforcement of sanctions.
Among the questions, the TSC chair asks: “Why doesn’t HMRC publish information on breaches in sanctions in a similar way to the Office for Financial Sanctions Implementation (OFSI), which gives the details of the company, how it breached sanctions and the amount of penalty issued?”
Many other countries around the world – most notably the United States – routinely “name and shame” those who break sanctions, in part as a deterrent and in part to inform other businesses about what it takes to break the rules. But HMRC instead protects the privacy of those who break sanctions.
The TSC has been scrutinising the sanctions regime in recent months, examining loopholes in the legislation and its enforcement. HMRC has been asked to respond to the letter by 17 February.
Business
Millions face council tax rise of more than 5% after government gives green light to bigger hikes
-
Sports2 years ago‘Storybook stuff’: Inside the night Bryce Harper sent the Phillies to the World Series
-
Sports10 months agoStory injured on diving stop, exits Red Sox game
-
Sports1 year agoGame 1 of WS least-watched in recorded history
-
Sports2 years agoMLB Rank 2023: Ranking baseball’s top 100 players
-
Sports3 years ago
Team Europe easily wins 4th straight Laver Cup
-
Environment2 years agoJapan and South Korea have a lot at stake in a free and open South China Sea
-
Environment2 years agoGame-changing Lectric XPedition launched as affordable electric cargo bike
-
Business2 years agoBank of England’s extraordinary response to government policy is almost unthinkable | Ed Conway