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The ramping up of the national minimum wage since 2015 has more than halved the share of low-paid employees in Britain. But it is far from job done: too few low-paying jobs offer dignity, respect and security to the people doing them. This article reports on how the minimum wage has transformed pay - and how we can go beyond this to make real progress on providing 'good work'.

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After a decade and a half of relative economic decline, Britain needs a new economic strategy. And good work must be at its heart - an explicit goal, not a hoped-for by-product of growth. This is a necessary precondition for a strategy that offers a credible promise of shared prosperity in the years ahead, strengthening not just our economy but our society and democracy too. Why is good work so important? Because at the moment too many lower earners do not have it. Their job satisfaction has fallen (in stark contrast to higher earners), even as the minimum wage has risen. Too often they are not treated with dignity and respect, with little or no protection from unexpected changes to the shifts they work and the wages they take home. And they lack many of the things that higher earners take for granted: the lack of adequate sick pay, for example, means illness is bad for the financial, as well as physical, health of low-paid workers in a way most higher earners never experience.

This paper considers what it would mean to put good work centre stage. It requires us to go far beyond the narrow focus this century on a higher minimum wage, because although pay is crucial it is far from all that matters. It necessitates a radically different approach to the trade-offs that are inherent if real progress is to be made: better jobs for some will mean higher prices for others. And good work must be seen as part of a route to achieving wider economic policy objectives - an integral part of an economic strategy that engages with what the UK produces and consumes, alongside who benefits from it doing so. This Low Pay Britain report is the 13th in an annual series, where we take stock of the state of low-paid work. This edition also forms part of our Economy 2030 Inquiry, which seeks to set out what a plausible economic strategy that tackles the UK's twin problems of high inequality and low growth might be. It is an argument for putting good work centre stage, and a policy agenda for doing so.

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Despite unemployment reaching historic lows, a rise in economic inactivity means that the UK employment rate remains one percentage point lower than pre-pandemic. This paper investigates the causes and sets out some policy recommendations. The rise in economic inactivity since [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 has not been a universal experience. The UK's labour force participation rate among 15-64-year-olds is still relatively high, but has fallen from the seventh of 38 OECD countries in 2019 to fifteenth in 2022. While there was an increase in flows from employment into economic inactivity due to retirement during the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK is facing a longer-term, and more widespread, rise in economic inactivity due to long-term sickness. This is part of a wider trend of rising disability and long-term sickness that is not limited to those out of the labour market: the number of working-age people with disabilities increased by 2.3 million between 2013 and 2022, with four-fifths (83 per cent) of this rise among people in employment.

Government efforts to boost activity should not focus solely on the newly inactive, since there are good reasons to think that policy will not reach many of them. Many have come from high-paying, professional jobs; many of these adults will be living comfortably in their early retirement, and government policy is unlikely to prompt them to 'un-retire'. Policy should instead focus on groups that saw significant improvements in the 2010s, both here and in other advanced economies: older workers, women with children, and those affected by rising ill-health and disability.

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