Then last month, after Chancellor Rishi Sunak moved to start easing state support for his job retention scheme, she was made redundant. So she went straight out and landed a job serving food and drinks five days a week in a local beach bar. She added another job as a housekeeper for holiday lettings. “I never thought for a minute that I’d be on minimum wage in a beach bar when only a year ago I was working in an office and earning £45,000,” she says.

Ackland is the mother of a daughter with mental health problems and her teenage stepson has autism. She is 50 years old, a difficult age as dark economic storm clouds gather; huge job losses are announced almost daily and several key sectors, from entertainment to retail, are in meltdown. She isn’t downcast. Instead she spends any spare time setting up her own business, building a website and starting to sell personalised goods, already picking up some trade from former clients. “I just feel people my age have to be able to adapt to change,” she said. “Perhaps I am lucky that I can reinvent myself because I know some people struggle and become gloomy.”

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How Covid exposed the world's lack of care

By Ian Birrell

Change can be hard to handle. It is especially challenging for older people, who have spent decades doing the same job, and have watched their firm and their future suddenly smashed by a disease that erupted in China. On a regular basis we hear of household names, from British Airways to Marks & Spencer, shedding vast numbers of staff, while below the radar thousands of small businesses and self-employed people are struggling for survival. We stand on the edge of economic catastrophe while confronting a pandemic that exposes gaping flaws in society even as it speeds up huge changes in the way we live and work.

There has, rightly, been considerable focus on younger generations hurt on several fronts by this crisis. But another chunk of society may, ultimately, suffer even more from these turbulent events. Some analysts fear those hardest hit could be older workers, the pandemic devastating their mental and physical health as well as their wealth. Many men and women in their 50s and early 60s may never hold down a permanent job again, tumbling into a financial hole that corrodes their sense of self-worth just as the state pension age goes up later this year.

Official data shows those hit hardest by pandemic are people at the start and end of the working age range. It raises issues at both ends of the labour market. Yet it also presents our rapidly-ageing society with a new problem. During Britain’s last period of swollen unemployment in the Thatcher era, it was simply accepted people in their sixties would retire, but now things are different.”The need to get people over 60 back into work has never been thought about before in a recession. It is a new thing for this country — but we can’t just shuffle them out of work,” says Emily Andrews, research manager at the Centre for Ageing Better.

Many people in their 50s will live for several more decades. Yet their statistics look grim. Even before pandemic — after years of job expansion — there were one million people aged between 50 and 64 thought to be “involuntarily jobless”. Citizens who have hit their half century also make up almost half the self-employed workforce, their numbers rising nearly two-thirds over the past decade — and this is the group least protected by Sunak’s interventions. Recent research by the Centre for Ageing Better and the Learning and Work Institute discovered the number of older workers on unemployment-related benefits has already nearly doubled due to the virus, rising from 304,000 in March to 588,000 in June, with another 400,000 predicted to lose their jobs when furloughing ends in the autumn.

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Generation corona has been handed a life sentence

By Will Tanner

These are terrifying figures. But it gets worse. One reason for that growth in older self-employment is that workers over 50 struggle to find new jobs, whether due to prejudice, perceived lack of technological skills or health concerns. Research by Business in the Community in February, before most people heard of coronavirus, showed barely one-third of people in this age bracket losing jobs found new ones. Others end up in the gig economy or stuck in menial jobs that waste skills developed over decades. Age bias affects women especially: another study found females over 50 up to 25 times less likely to be called for a job interview than those in their late 20s.

Then there are all the people who struck out on their own because they grew tired of the rat race and commuting, many of whom now find themselves marooned in unexpected difficulties as they try to cling on to freelance work. “There are lots of people like me who packed up conventional jobs but many of these people are struggling now,” says Steve Moore, who had his last ‘proper job’ when he was 40 and has since thrived doing different consultancy work over the past 15 years.

Moore, a former chief executive of David Cameron’s Big Society Network, says people are desperate: “The furlough did not help the self-employed, while these are also the first people to be cut when companies need to make savings since they protect their own staff. Many are also working in areas that are really hurting such as events, media, music and hospitality. Meanwhile there are none of the usual receptions and conferences where you can network, those serendipitous encounters that lead to work.”

Typical of these types is Paul Clarke, a 52-year-old former management consultant. 10 years ago he chucked in a technology job to become a photographer and build a creative career. He has been brilliantly successful, even bagging the European contract for the Oscar film awards — until pandemic struck Britain. “Within two weeks I’d lost six figures in orders,” he told me. “I can’t see film industry receptions being held again in Europe for several years.”

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The Covid-19 class war

By James Bloodworth

Clarke missed out on all Sunak’s state handouts, spent the first month of the pandemic learning new video skills, and has since managed to rebuild approaching half his income by “taking jobs I would not have touched six months ago”. He calls himself “a scrapper” and is confident he can survive a downturn some fear could be the most severe since the early eighteenth century. But there is a knock-on effect, since he has stopped passing on contracts to colleagues in his field — and he knows several people struggling badly, including one who is having to sell his home to survive.

Clarke still has children at school, while his wife’s elderly parents need support. He highlights how this is the sandwich generation: often caring for parents who are seeing health deteriorate while still supporting their children. Both these challenges have become harder in the pandemic with concern over care homes, closed schools and crashing job markets. People with caring responsibilities or disabilities, who tend to be older, are especially vulnerable to job losses as well as mental health struggles.

This is a bleak picture for people who might have looked forward to easing back into their twilight years of work. There is a misguided belief that this generation has paid off its mortgages and lives in relative prosperity. But there were 617,000 people aged over 50 on Universal Credit last month, which means they must have savings of less than £16,000. This is also the generation that has lost the security of defined pension schemes enjoyed by their predecessors — and many could end up struggling on the breadline for several decades. The number of renters over the age of 50 has more than doubled in the last decade, which could leave them vulnerable when the eviction ban is lifted on Sunday.

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How lockdown left me afraid of life

By Stephen Pollard

One survey last year indicated that many people already thought they had retired too early, with one-third saying they lost all purpose in life after leaving their work. The first month at home might be fun in the garden or on the golf course, but what about the next 50 years — especially if there is no money to fulfil any long-cherished dreams in retirement, let alone cash for some extra care help as health starts to decline? “It is almost like silent suffering,” said Stuart Lewis, founder of Rest Less, a digital jobs website for the over 50s. “This country has an epidemic of loneliness that is especially acute in post-retirement. People get social stimulation from their workplaces and I think the impact of this will be felt for a very long time.”

There is also a growing perception among economists that this crash will be closer in style to the downturn after the 2008 banking crisis in the United States, which hit older workers especially hard, rather than the British version that saw wages stagnate but rising job numbers, especially for older people. It took older workers in the US almost twice as long to find new jobs as younger colleagues, forcing them to take far bigger pay cuts to return to the workplace. One analysis found men in their sixties accepted salaries more than one-third lower than before, compared with a cut of just 1.5% for their colleagues three decades younger. Many ended up dipping into retirement savings, storing up problems for later years.

Among the legacies of that chronic American meltdown were the “deaths of despair” highlighted by Nobel-winning British economist Angus Deaton and his wife Anne Case. This pair of Princeton academics showed how working-age men and women without four-year college degrees were dying in huge numbers from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease, sparking a fall in US life expectancy. Among the causes they identified were job losses amid manufacturing decline that led to falling income and less financial security — “this long-term drip of losing opportunities and losing meaning and structure in life,” according to Deaton. There have been suggestions similar concerns started to infect Britain even before the arrival of Covid-19.

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By Justin Webb

Technology is seen as a fresh factor, amplified by the rapid shift online of sectors such as retail during the pandemic. Certainly younger workers are digital natives, as well as being cheaper to employ. But many people in their 50s have been using computers for a couple of decades, growing very comfortable in the digital environment. Regardless, the government will need to offer bespoke training for older workers to help many adapt and return to the workplace as it wakes up to one more headache intensified by this wretched pandemic.

The last thing Britain needs now is old and young generations pitched against each other fighting for the dwindling spoils of a downturn, especially when the wounds of Brexit remain raw and people in their twenties are poorer than their predecessors. But nor should policy-makers ignore the gravity of issues confronting many older workers. For have no doubt that in a fast-ageing society it is a disaster in economic, human and societal terms to have swathes of economically-inactive people in their fifties and sixties.

In ordinary times, there are correctives to inequality. Education, for example. For some children, life is roughly sketched out before they even pull on their first school uniform. According to the Sutton Trust, children from the poorest fifth of families are almost a year (11.1 months) behind middle-income families in scores on vocabulary tests by the time they are five — often because parents do not have the time or resources to read with them at home. Schools exist to reduce this gap; they give poorer children the opportunity to pull level with their better-off peers.

With Covid-19 shuttering schools, all pupils are having to ‘learn’ from home. Inevitably, those disadvantaged pupils are falling behind. Wealthier parents are more likely to have the resources to home educate their children — or pay for tutors. Meanwhile, private schools are better equipped to facilitate distance learning. According to a survey by the pollsters Teacher Tapp, 27% of teachers in private secondary schools had worked with online video conferencing, compared with just 2% of teachers at state secondaries.

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Brexit has exposed our education apartheid

By Matthew Goodwin

While children are losing out in lockdown, so, too, are their parents. The old class divide of the 20th century was crudely defined as existing between those who worked with their brains and those who toiled with their hands. The contemporary divide, for the foreseeable future at least, will be between those forced into potentially unsafe working environments and an office class who have the relative luxury of working from home.

Data from the ONS illustrate the gulf between these two groups. Men working in the lowest skilled occupations — security guards, bus drivers, shop workers — already have some of the highest Covid-19 death rates. While frontline healthcare professionals such as doctors and nurses do not appear to be at significantly increased risk of death from the virus, those working in social care are, with rates of 23.4 deaths per 100,000 males and 9.6 deaths per 100,000 females. These roles are low status — as one carer told me when I worked in the sector while researching my book Hired in 2016, most care workers are “treated like glorified cleaners”. Now they are classed as ‘key workers’, even as the Government fails to provide enough Personal Protective Equipment.

In other words, Covid-19 mortality is a class issue.

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Why are minorities so hard hit by Covid-19?

By Saloni Dattani

Boris Johnson’s dilemma is unenviable. The notion that the lockdown can go on indefinitely until a vaccine is found is a popular misconception. According to YouGov, more than a third of the population (37%) believe the Government should wait until there are no new cases of Covid-19 at all before beginning to ease restrictions. But for every month we are locked down, the economy will take years to recover.

So informing people, as the Prime Minister did, that people can work if it is safe for them to do so, isn’t some dastardly Tory plot to give the virus an opportunity to wipe out the elderly and vulnerable. It’s an attempt to keep the economy moving. It is an unhappy consequence of the crisis that the manual and professional workforces face very different levels of risk.

This is compounded by the fact that inequality affects your risk from Covid. Men born in the most deprived areas of Britain can expect almost 20 (18.6) fewer years of good health compared to those born in the least deprived areas. These inequalities are even worse when it comes to black and ethnic minority Britons. Disadvantaged groups are therefore more likely to experience complications if they catch the virus.

But getting people back to work is a necessity. So what’s the solution?

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'How to end lockdown' is the only story in town

By Sam Leith

One school of thought, until recently ascendant in the Labour Party, is to ‘tax the rich’. But the tab for months of lockdown is going to fall heavily on the heads of the working class — as well as on the middle-classes. It is, therefore, strange to see prominent Left-wingers crudely portraying any gradual economic re-opening as being motivated by “profit margins and shareholder returns” — rather than something that is essential to stave off economic collapse. The longer the lockdown continues, the more people are going to be squeezed during the process of recovery — including those who can least afford to be squeezed.

Rishi Sunak has — thankfully — ignored those who have called for the Job Retention Scheme to be brought to an end, and announced that it will continue until October. As the Resolution Foundation has pointed out, by paying 80% of the wages for 6.3 million jobs, the Chancellor has softened the burden of hardship significantly.

That has not stopped bad-taste disquiet about the scheme from some Tory MPs: former party leader Iain Duncan Smith said the public had been “feather-bedded by the Chancellor” and were “happy to stay at home and do nothing”. Yet that says more about Iain Duncan Smith — who once claimed a £39 breakfast on expenses — than it does about the British people.

The surest way to ensure further outbreaks of Covid-19 is to push people back into unsafe environments because the threat of poverty hangs over them. One of the most galling sights in the early days on the virus, back in early March, was that of tube carriages packed with low-paid workers who didn’t have the option to stay at home. A repeat of this would undo much of the hard work that has gone into lockdown and make further strict restrictions — with the attendant economic damage — inevitable.

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Today's liberals dream of a workerless paradise

By James Bloodworth

But how can we ensure that workplaces are safe? Since Keir Starmer took over as leader of the Labour Party, there have been calls to include senior Labour figures in the Government’s decision-making process. This is appropriate. When it comes to the pinch, politics is about material interests, and the different parties still — to some extent at least — represent the interests of different groups in society. The Labour Party remains the party of the trade unions, and anathema though it would be for many Right-wing Conservatives, the trade unions should have a bigger role in determining whether workplaces are safe for employees to return to.

The unions are already offering important advice that is not coming from elsewhere. For instance, the Independent Workers Union of Great Britain has argued, the Government should extend health and safety rights to the 1 in 10 adults working in Britain’s ‘gig’ economy. For years, employers have been claiming that gig work offers an unparalleled degree of freedom and flexibility. Surely, then, that freedom should encompass the right to refuse work in situations that might significantly endanger health — without fear of dismissal.

Nevertheless, a reassessment of our relationship with risk is going to have to take place over the coming months. Those who cannot work from home will inevitably be putting themselves at greater risk than those who can. Practical measures can be taken to ensure those workers are as safe as possible, but some level of risk is unavoidable.

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Will we ever take the Tube again?

By Michael Liebreich

People are born into different circumstances and politics is in part a process of correction — the long, arduous struggle to curb inequalities that, should they be allowed to flourish, invariably generate further inequalities. One mark of a civilised society is how we treat people who do the jobs the rest of us are unwilling to do — jobs that put them at greater risk. Jobs that are fundamental to the security and comfort enjoyed by the rest of us.

The slogan of a decade ago — ‘We’re all in this together’ — was, to cynical ears, code for: look after yourself, because we don’t care. As the virus sweeps across Britain, that phrase has been resurrected. Yet it retains that familiar undertone: some are suffering significantly more than others. And as ever, the deciding factor is social class.