One of my favourite questions in headlines of recent years was posed by the Daily Mail, which in 2014 asked: “Is there no one left in Britain who can make a sandwich?” This followed the news that a company supplying Marks & Spencer and Tesco was “forced” to recruit 300 staff in “HUNGARY” (capitalisation theirs).
But a crunch in the supply of labour doesn’t only impact lower-skilled, lower-paid roles. Between the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and the end of 2022, economic inactivity rose by more than half a million, according to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee report with the somewhat more laid-back title, “Where have all the workers gone?“
