The number of people not working in the UK due to long-term sickness has risen to a new record, official figures show.
The Office for National Statistics said more than two and a half million were not working because of health problems.
There had been a rise in mental health issues in younger people, the ONS said, as well as in back and neck pain, possibly due to home working.
The ONS figures also showed the squeeze on pay remains, with wage increases failing to keep up with rising prices.
However, public sector pay is now growing at the fastest pace for about 20 years.
A rise in part-time and self-employed workers helped to push up the employment rate in the first three months of the year, the ONS said, and the number of job vacancies fell again.
Speaking to the BBC’s Today programme, Darren Morgan, director of economic statistics at the ONS, said that since the Covid pandemic started there are “well over 400,000 more people outside of the labour market due to ill health and that means we are now at a new record level of comfortably over two and a half million”.
He added that an increase had been seen in “conditions related to mental health, particularly in the young”. There was also a rising number of people “having musculoskeletal issues, so problems connected to the back and neck, with some theories of the increase in home working contributing to that”.
“We’ve also seen an increase in the category that includes post-viral fatigue so perhaps long Covid having an impact.”
The employment rate edged up to 75.9% between January and March, the ONS said, helped by more part-time employees and self-employed workers, but the unemployment rate also rose slightly to 3.9%.
The ONS said these changes meant the number of those neither working nor looking for work had continued to fall.
One of the reasons why the UK economy has been doing less well than other developed nations has been the case of the missing workers, after millions stopped working during the pandemic.
Getting these people back to work is a key part of the government’s plan to get the economy growing again, and address the shortage of workers that has affected many sectors of the economy.
The latest figures show mixed progress on this front. Significant numbers of students, carers and even some retired people have started looking for work again, pushing the inactivity rate – the key measure of people not in work – down to 21%.
However, the rise in the number of people too ill to work is likely to worry policymakers.
“These figures show some gentle progress on bringing people back to the labour market,” said Neil Carberry, chief executive at the Recruitment and Employment Confederation.
“But we should be concerned by the high number of people who are economically inactive because they are sick, and progress on tackling inactivity overall is too slow.
“It is a year since the ONS reported on high worklessness, labour shortages and high inflation and too little has changed. This is holding the economy back by constraining companies’ ability to grow.”
The latest figures from the ONS also showed:
- the number of people on employers’ payrolls dropped in April, the first decline in more than two years
- job vacancy numbers fell for the 10th consecutive period, with firms holding back on recruitment due to uncertainty over the economic outlook
- growth in regular pay, which excludes bonuses, was 6.7% in the first three months of the year, but when price rises are taken into account, regular pay fell by 2%
- pay growth in the public sector was 5.6%, which was the highest rate since 2003
- the number of working days lost to strikes rose to 556,000 in March 2023, mainly due to walkouts in the health and education sectors.
The Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, said: “It’s encouraging that the unemployment rate remains historically low but difficulty in finding staff and rising prices are a worry for many families and businesses.”
But shadow work and pensions secretary Jonathan Ashworth said the government was a “drag” on the economy with family finances “being squeezed to breaking point by a further fall in real wages” and with fewer people in employment than before the pandemic.
