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There is an omertà, or code of silence, around 2020 – a blind spot. Most people don’t want to dwell on the pandemic, the trauma, the boredom, the anxiety and the uncertainty about when it would end, or if it would end, whether the rules would change or why the rules hadn’t already changed, and work out who was a covidiot or a superspreader or a doom monger.
But like a forgotten mask in an old coat pocket, the effects of the Covid pandemic are still with us. The lockdowns and the fear of being near other people, the restrictions on freedom and the despair of isolation – and the virus that killed more than 200,000 people – have all had profound impacts on Britain, on life at work and at home, and in the NHS, in schools and theatres, and on the rest of the economy.
Did it all begin with the first cases of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan in December 2019, with the World Health Organization’s declaration of a pandemic on 11 March 2020 or when Boris Johnson told people on 23 March that they should stay home, save lives and protect the NHS? Take your pick – five years later, it’s almost as hard to define the pandemic as it is to disentangle its effects from other events like Brexit and the invasion of Ukraine.
Some changes are obvious. Even though there is a constant drumbeat of chief executive orders to return to the office, about 28% of UK workers still spend some part of their week working from home. The NHS backlog means 6.24 million people in England are waiting for treatment, a number falling slowly but that remains stubbornly high.
Other effects are less obvious, like the impact on children’s mental health. And there are areas of British life which have changed substantially since 2020 without a clear direct link to the pandemic, such as the rising number of people living in poverty.
“The pandemic reinforced and exacerbated existing inequalities – it was a magnifying glass exposing what was already there,” said Hetan Shah, chief executive of the British Academy.
“Like with the Spanish flu, which was largely forgotten after it happened, we’ve sort of tried to do the same. But I feel that those who’ve been most affected by the pandemic are also the ones that are quite easily forgotten: the poorest, people who are disabled, and children in particular, who gave up a lot but were the least likely to be at risk.”
One of the certainties is that the UK government borrowed a vast amount of money during the pandemic, a debt of about £339bn, according to Stephen Millard, interim director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.
That means paying extra interest of about £16bn, roughly half the annual defence budget – a huge problem for Rachel Reeves, the chancellor.
“Is the economy a lot smaller today than it would have been if we hadn’t had Covid?” said Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. “That’s a really hard question to answer. Obviously we’ve also had Brexit and political chaos and the energy price crisis and so on.
“But it certainly looks like national income per head today is pretty much the same as where it was back in 2019, and probably wouldn’t be quite so bad if we haven’t had Covid. It doesn’t seem to have had that effect in the US.”
Some things have come and gone. The boom in TV streaming services has turned into a bust, with TV executives looking to retrain rather than look for the new Normal People or another Joe Exotic.
There are no longer daily briefings about the virus from Patrick Vallance or Prof Chris Whitty, no furlough payments and no £10,000 fines for having a party. Zoom is now entirely for work rather than partying.
Whoever they blame, the number of people who would “almost never” trust the government to put the nation’s interests first has gone from 34% in 2019 to 45%, according to the British Social Attitudes survey.
And without Covid, Partygate and Barnard Castle eye tests, Boris Johnson’s tenure at No 10 might have lasted far longer.
Towards the end of 2020, Lord Vallance commissioned the British Academy to consider the long-terms social consequences of the pandemic.
“We called [our report] the Covid Decade,” Shah said. “The point is that we expect the social consequences of the pandemic to last that long, and I think the data bears it out. We’ve seen a slow puncture across our public services, that sense of nothing works in Britain.
“The worry is that unless there’s active work to stop them, some of the trends we’re seeing will continue. If there’s political focus, some of these issues could be tackled.” James Tapper
Health
In the first days of the pandemic, when people stayed at home, if they could, to avoid catching a virus that seemed to be deadly and indiscriminate, the main concern was whether the NHS could cope. Wards were cleared of older patients, spreading Covid into care homes more rapidly, and routine operations were cancelled until they could resume in Covid-safe wards.
“Everyone’s experience of Covid was slightly different,” said Siva Anandaciva, director of policy at the King’s Fund. “But the thing that keeps coming up is that our system was being run in the red zone for years and years before the pandemic. If you haven’t got enough beds, if you’re understaffed, if you haven’t got nearly as many MRI or CT scans as you need, then how can you not expect to have a slow recovery?”
The message “Protect the NHS” might have been counterproductive, as people who needed medical care tried to soldier on rather than seek help. The population is less healthy than it was in 2019: life expectancy fell dramatically and has only recovered to 2013 levels for men.
During the first stage of the pandemic, medical staff worked endlessly, sweating in PPE gear on shift after shift to save lives. But as the adrenalin wore off, morale waned after a series of strikes over pay. One of the puzzles confronting NHS leaders is that hospitals are much less productive than they were before the pandemic, achieving 1.8% less activity in 2023 than in 2019.
“It’s really hard to explain,” Anandaciva said. “When I talk to clinicians they say it’s a loss of morale, a loss of goodwill, which is really hard to show. It’s not that people aren’t working hard, but where someone used to turn up 45 minutes early for their shift so they could log in to multiple IT systems, and stay an hour or two late to make sure there was a thorough handover, now they’re saying: ‘Well, why should I do that?’”
This decline in productivity has been offset by virtual appointments – GPs do many more telephone appointments, and NHS England has more than 12,000 virtual ward beds, meaning that patients do their own blood pressure readings or oxygen level checks. This would not have happened if it had not been shown to work during the pandemic, Anandaciva said.
Another enduring issue is worsening mental health, particularly among children and young adults. The Health Foundation found that referrals rose by more than 50% from 2020-21 to 2022-23. Of all diseases affecting 10- to 24-year-olds, 45% relate to mental health.
Research by the King’s Fund into responses to other disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, found that mental health was consistently overlooked. “One of my biggest concerns is child and adolescent mental health,” Anandaciva said. “When I asked people [in other disaster zones]: ‘What do you regret not doing more on?’, they said: ‘We didn’t pay enough attention to kids, and the psychological distress this scarring can have – you suddenly see a pop-up in public services later on. We wish we’d done more.’”James Tapper
Education
Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner during the pandemic, says she argued “long and hard and strongly” with ministers that schools needed to be the last to close and the first to open again. They didn’t listen.
In March 2020 the UK’s 24,000 schools were closed for most children and exams were cancelled. In the months that followed, Longfield watched in frustration as pub gardens, restaurants and even theme parks reopened, but schools – crucial not only for children’s learning but also for their mental health and safeguarding – didn’t.
“When shops reopened, I remember watching on television as lines of people snaked round Primark, waiting with their children, while schools couldn’t reopen,” she recalls.
Multiple research studies have shown that Covid widened the disadvantage gap already stubbornly present in education. Longfield argues that this impact will be felt for many years, visible not only in disparities in pupil attainment but also in soaring school absence, a ballooning youth mental health crisis, and rising exclusions and gang violence.
She says that in 2020 many state schools didn’t have the digital technology to shift into teaching children at home, “whereas private schools were often well equipped and using it already”.
Research by Ofcom in early 2020 found that between 1 million and 1.8 million children – mostly from low-income families – had no access to a tablet or computer to learn on at home, and nearly a million were without an acceptable internet connection. Teachers reported that poorer children were also less likely to have a quiet space to work.
Despite a government drive to distribute laptops, the Sutton Trust found that by the first week of the January 2021 lockdown had little improved, with just 10% of teachers reporting that all their students had adequate access to a device for remote learning.
In February 2021 Kevan Collins was appointed to lead a monumental catch-up operation in education, with Boris Johnson declaring: “I am absolutely determined no child will be left behind as a result of the pandemic.”
Longfield recalls: “The prime minister asked him to come up with a plan and not worry about the cost because this was so important.” That plan targeted most funding towards children in disadvantaged areas who were already trying to catch up before the pandemic started.
Longfield saw it as the “fundamental reset” these children needed.
However, hours before it was due to be announced in June, the Treasury vetoed Collins’ £15bn “landmark investment” in teachers, tutoring and an extended school day, and a watered-down £1.4bn tutoring plan took its place. Collins resigned, warning the funding did “not come close to meeting the scale of the challenge”.
The average primary school would receive £6,000 a year, equivalent to £22 per child. In contrast the US had committed £1,600 per child, and this rose to £2,500 in the Netherlands.
“The words were that the money had run out. For me and everyone who knew what was happening in education, it was devastating,” Longfield says.
“Yet again it felt like children were just too late to the party to be able to get the help they needed.” Anna Fazackerley
Life
The online shopping boom that arrived when many people were stuck at home all day has persisted. About a third of global fashion sales are online, according to Euromonitor International, and influencers on TikTok and elsewhere are on hand to give tips about vouchers and dupes – cheaper near-duplicate products. Shops are now places to “showcase brand identity, offer immersive experiences and promote community”, according to Euromonitor’s Marguerite Le Rolland.
The cost of living crisis affected people unevenly. Those with money spent more on their homes, with lockdown renovations pushing the cost of building work up, and fashion brands launching “furniture, lighting, floor coverings, fabric and wall coverings, fine tableware, decorative accessories, pet goods, bed and bath linens and even cleaning products,” Fflur Roberts, Euromonitor’s head of luxury goods, said.
People being at home and meeting neighbours in street WhatsApp groups, another lockdown innovation, might have improved community cohesion. Measures of social trust in the World Values Survey showed that 46% of Britons thought most people could be trusted, higher than the previous peak of 43% in 1981.
Some lockdown hobbies have done better than others. Sourdough baking has continued to rise, and gardening, photography, country walks and small-screen pursuits such as Wordle and Duolingo have continued to ride their lockdown wave. But the RSPCA said last year that the number of abandoned animals had risen 51% in the last three years.
For people without money, life has got substantially harder. “One in four people in the UK are living in poverty,” said Hetan Shah, chief executive. “That rose by two percentage points from 2019-20 to 2022-23, so there’s clearly some element of a pandemic effect. And a third of children are living in poverty, which is a 5% increase. It’s a big worry.”
There was a moment of hope when thousands of rough sleepers were given accommodation during the first lockdown, but the Everyone In scheme lasted only a few months. The annual rough sleeping snapshot showed a 20% rise last month, and the picture for those in temporary accommodation is similarly bleak, with 164,000 children in England in temporary homes.
“The housing crisis has spread into almost every town and city,” said Cllr Hannah Dalton, housing spokesperson for the District Councils’ Network. “The response to Covid still inspires us. The Everyone In policy eradicated street homelessness pretty much overnight. We’re ready to do this all again by delivering a prevention revolution.”
Have public attitudes changed? Anti-vaxxer was not a term in general use until 2021, but only 70% of UK adults said vaccinations were safe and effective in a 2023 study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, down from 90% in 2018. Satisfaction with the NHS has also fallen, with only 24% saying they were very or quite satisfied in 2023, the lowest level since the British Social Attitudes survey began in 1983.
“It’s quite remarkable how things haven’t changed in some ways,” said Calum Weir, an Opinium researcher. “We’ve tracked people’s most important issues since 2020 and it’s remarkable how steady health is.” Immigration has risen and Brexit has fallen, he added. “I don’t think many people are even thinking about Covid now.” James Tapper
Economy
The economic impact of Covid was always going to be large. The global economy slowed dramatically when almost every country introduced lockdowns or other legal restrictions in March 2020, leaving container ships stranded and sending shockwaves through the international trade system.
But exactly how large is still a matter that economists are picking through. Growth was slower in the UK after the 2008 global financial crisis, and it has got slower still since the pandemic, Stephen Millard of the National Institute for Social and Economic Research said.
“The jury is generally out, but it may be that the increase in hybrid working could explain a slight fall in productivity growth rates. But it may be something else.”
Some sectors felt the brunt earlier than others. The boom in lockdown renovations and the supply chain crisis caused shortages of bricks, timber and other materials in 2021. Cycling also boomed – a healthy lockdown pursuit that saw bike shops sell out of stock only for the market to crash in 2023 because longer lead times made it harder to predict demand.
Another widely reported issue is the number of working-age people who are economically inactive, with the largest increase in 50- to 64-year-olds, prompting talk of a “great retirement”.
“But the cost of living crisis suggested to people that maybe their pensions weren’t really covering it, so some came back, but we found that a large number of people were economically inactive due to long-term sickness,” Millard said.
The large amounts of money spent on furlough and supporting business probably contributed to the return of inflation.
“The thing that was clearly surprising in the immediate aftermath was that everyone was worried once furlough ended, unemployment would rise,” said Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studiess. “And exactly the opposite happened. There was a zero increase in unemployment the next month. And so in a sense what we learned, I think, was that we went on with furlough for much too long, or were much too generous with it from an economic point of view, which was certainly not obvious at the time.”
He pointed out that retail and hospitality businesses still receive relief on their business rates – a discount introduced when shops, pubs and restaurants were forbidden from opening.
“Broadly speaking, we actually spent more and borrowed more than almost any other country. I mean, we were particularly generous in the sense that we increased our borrowing and debt by more than most other countries.” The Bank of England introduced massive quantitative easing as the pandemic grew, which was appropriate in the 2008 banking crisis, but “it was not obvious that that was the right thing to do, certainly after the first couple of months.
“Part of the answer is that every crisis is different, and there’s always a danger of learning from the last one,” he said. “I think we’ve learned that the economy is remarkably dynamic and resilient, at least to some sorts of shocks, given some sorts of support. And I hope that we learn to care more for our children.” James Tapper
Arts
From comedians to actors and concert soloists, live performers lost all their regular income at the start of the pandemic. And as with the party game, each time the music started up again after a Covid lockdown, some of the chairs had been taken away. An infamous 2020 government poster depicted a young ballerina dubbed “Fatima” and urged performers to pivot to jobs in “cyber”. Most artists found this advice hard to take after the training and sacrifice required to get on to the stage. Tickets sales at British theatres fell by 92% in the first year.
The government’s Culture Recovery Fund eventually responded with a £1.57bn package of interventions for those cultural and heritage organisations on the edge of financial collapse in 2020. This was followed by a 2022 Omicron support fund. While many institutions survived as a result, subsequently venues and theatres have foundered on a grand scale. Emergency reserves, where they existed, were quickly tapped and later the swingeing cuts meted out by local authorities in crisis, coupled with enforced closures due to reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (Raac) found in venues, together struck at the fabric of live entertainment, lessening the amount of work premiering across the nation. This year playwright David Hare lamented the dearth of new regional productions.
Online platforms were adopted by everyone, of course, but have not proved lucrative for cultural events. During the winter Arts Council England launched a pilot scheme to boost touring and revive live theatre and dance. Called Incentivising Touring, it has won support from director Jonathan Church, who says: “Post Covid, regional touring of large-scale quality drama has been challenging and has urgently needed assistance. What is particularly exciting is that this pilot focuses on work that really does have the potential to be commercial.”
Not all the arts took hits on the same scale. Publishing benefited, although it shifted emphasis to digital formats and audiobooks, while bingeing on box-set streaming dramas became a popular endurance sport. Although TV programmes were initially almost impossible to make, the pandemic spawned a wholesale raiding of back catalogues, a habit that has hung around. The pandemic is at least partly to blame for the current slump in British television production.
The lasting effect on the film industry is harder to monitor because the hiatus caused by Covid was exacerbated by the Hollywood strikes of 2023. Cinemas, like theatres, have worked their way back into social life, with film attendance modestly up last year to 126.5 million.
An early UCL report found the pandemic had been a bracing reminder of the value of culture as a form of expression and connection in times of emergency and crisis. The lockdowns, it seems, disrupted the “usual predictors of engagement” like class, income, age and health. But the different lockdowns produced varied figures for cultural engagement. Once the Blitz-style community spirit faded away, some enthusiasm palled.
Covid’s key cultural legacy may prove to be the work that tries to address the turmoil of the period. Jack Thorne’s TV drama Help, starring Jodie Comer and Stephen Graham, earned plaudits, as has the recent film Grand Theft Hamlet. Vanessa Thorpe
