Areas like Nottinghamshire coalfields see decade of regeneration wiped out by pandemic say researchers

The Coalfields Regeneration Trust and the Industrial Communities Alliance commissioned a report from Sheffield Hallam University on the impact of Covid on local economies, labour markets and public health.

Trust chair Peter McNestry said: “Once again, we are left to try to pick up the pieces as our communities are hit by another crisis. After the losses of industry throughout the coalfields, then ten years of Government austerity, the effect of the pandemic cannot be ignored.

“This report provides the evidence in black and white that more needs to be done if our residents are ever to have a chance of moving forward.”

He added: “The Government needs to keep levelling up firmly on the agenda and make it happen. We have provided detailed plans and strategies that will make a difference for generations, yet we cannot work alone.”

The report found that between February and November 2020, unemployment rose by 310,000 in older industrial towns, 100,000 in the former coalfields and 140,000 in the main regional cities. Among people aged 16-24, unemployment doubled.

By late 2020,almost one-in-six of all adults of working age in those areas were receiving out-of-work benefits. In some places it was as high as 20 per cent.

Older industrial Britain also saw Covid infection rates 10-20 per cent higher than the UK average, and deaths from all causes an average 30 per cent higher.

Those facts are likely indicators of older, less healthy local populations with fewer office jobs and more factories and warehouses.

Professor Steve Fothergill, co-author of the report at the Centre for Regional Economic Social Research, said: “As the economy recovered from the 2008 financial crisis there was real progress in bringing down unemployment in older industrial Britain, though the problem had by no means been solved.

“In less than a year, the increase in unemployment across older industrial Britain has more than offset these gains.”

To read the full report, go to https://bit.ly/3pmGD4I.

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