As the Chancellor delivered his spring budget this week, the elephant in the room was there for all to see — the UK has a growth problem.
Public services are buckling under demand and resource constraints. Deep income, wealth, and opportunity inequalities are holding swathes of the UK population back. And employers’ investment in skills and training has declined over the past half a decade.
Jeremy Hunt articulated those challenges and made some necessary steps to address them. Plans to introduce “returnerships” and expand skills bootcamps to help the over-50s to retrain and get back into work are important but small steps in plugging our chronic skills gap and returning to pre-pandemic employment levels.
