British men are giving up on work faster than anywhere else in the richest parts of the world.

A trend that started during the financial crisis accelerated during lockdown, and it’s hurting the economy.

The proportion of men aged 16 to 64 who are participating in the labour force in Britain has plunged from a record high of 84pc in 2009 to 80.9pc this year, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). That means around two in every 10 men who could theoretically be working are sitting on the sidelines.

That’s a much bigger drop than in the US, which is also experiencing a steady decline in workforce participation. The share of men either in work or looking for a job is now higher in Canada and Germany than in the UK.

Male inactivity is now close to a record high, at 18.8pc. While the share of inactive working age women is higher, at 24.7pc, this level has been falling for decades as more women enter the workforce. On the current course, the two will converge in the coming years as more women seek jobs and more men drop out.

Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that 3.9m working age men were economically inactive between June and August, an extra 601,000 since February 2020.

Why are fewer men working? Jonathan Cribb, an associate director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), says the world of work has become less certain for men over the past few decades.

“Before the 1970s, men – even less-educated men – had high employment rates until their state pension age at 65.”

The decline of industry left many with nowhere else to go. Many in manufacturing swapped the workplace for incapacity benefits, and never got a job again.

Today, the jobs that have replaced industry have largely been in lower paid sectors like retail, hospitality or social care, which also tend to attract more applications from women.

Cribb says participation levels started to change around after 1995 when “new generations of men came into the labour market with higher skills” thanks to rising levels of university education.

Britons became not just smarter but richer. More people found higher skilled jobs, boosting the economy as a result.

However, participation rates peaked in 2009 just as the financial crisis led to large-scale lay-offs in male-dominated industries such as banking and an economic contraction. The level of men working hasn’t recovered since.

Stepping back, Louise Murphy, an economist at the Resolution Foundation, notes that male work patterns have shifted significantly.

“What you see increasingly is men working in lower paid, part-time jobs or shorter hours. And part of that reflects people not being able to get the work they want,” she says.

The number of men working part-time has increased by more than 300,000 since lockdown while the level for women – who overall are much more likely to be working part-time – has stayed flat.

Men, on average, are working an hour less each week since lockdown, according to official statistics. They worked an average of 35.3 hours per week in 2022, ONS data show – roughly an hour less than in 2019, and more than three hours less than in 1998.

By contrast, women slightly increased their average weekly hours from 27.4 in 2019 to 27.9 hours in 2022. This was not enough to make up for the reduction in men’s hours, with the economy losing the equivalent of another 310,000 people from the workforce through reduced hours.

The average hours worked by men fell in every age category except those aged over 65 during the pandemic, in a continuation of the trends seen over the previous quarter of a century.

Murphy at the Resolution Foundation says the reduction in hours had been driven by men in low-paid jobs.

She said: “We know that higher income men are tending to work longer hours and lower-income men are working shorter hours.”

There are worrying signs that this trend of rising education levels that boosting growth could be coming undone, especially for men.

There are currently 448,000 men aged between 18 and 24 who are not in work, education or training (Neet), the highest number in a decade. The number has risen sharply since the pandemic, compared with a fairly steady level for women, at 359,000 at the end of June.

Cribb describes this trend as “worrying” and suggests some of it started in the classroom during lockdown.

“Children were not prioritised during the pandemic,” he says. “I think it’s an open and reasonable question whether this is a hangover from poor-quality education during the pandemic and the huge disruptions that happened.”

Laurance Hancock, founder of The Boathouse Youth, a charity, says he’s witnessed the damage of lockdown first-hand.

Based in Blackpool, Hancock’s organisation helps more than 1,200 children and young people in poverty every year to get on with their lives.

While many middle-class families enjoyed lockdown, this was not the case for many those who struggled to make ends meet.

“The young people that we’re supporting, some of them didn’t even have a balcony to go outside in,” says Hancock. “And it was all that time when children weren’t allowed to go to the supermarket and playgrounds were having chains put around the gates on them.

“I talk about the toxic trio of drugs, alcohol and mental health issues that often lead to domestic violence. And we saw a huge spike, because people just couldn’t cope. And that led to really high emotions and nowhere to go. And that really just f----- people up.”

Experiences at school provide a clear foundation to attitudes to the world of work, he argues. Much of that was lost for a generation.

“School is your first experience of the establishment. It’s where you realise that you’re a small part of something bigger, and there are rules you need to adhere to.

“So if you don’t have a good experience at school, that impacts on your ability to be able to get through life, that there will always be rules to follow. And if you push against that too hard, you will end up just being on your own.”

Tens of thousands of students are graduating without joining the workforce, while the number of people claiming incapacity benefits for mental health conditions has also surged. Recent research also shows that an increasing number of children are claiming disability benefits for mental health issues, with 15-year-olds now more likely to be receiving a disability benefit than adults under the age of 52.

“If I were a policymaker, I would probably be concerned about two things,” says Cribb. “The higher rates of young people not in employment, education, in training, and the correlation with poor mental health.

“And I would be concerned about the rates of people on disability benefits. Because they either reflect much poorer health, or people’s perceived need to get on to disability benefits to help with their cost of living and in a sense getting stuck on these things at a significant cost to the state.”

Murphy says more needs to be done to keep young people engaged with work, especially young men.

“I think it’s definitely worrying if people do have spells out of work early in their adulthood,” she says.

“All the evidence suggests that that is bad for their future employment chances and wages. And yet, the longer you spend out of work, generally the harder it is to re-engage.”