By Dr Jatinder Hayre
Introduction:
The COVID‑19 crisis did not create inequality: it merely switched on floodlights over a landscape already scarred by austerity. The Lost Generation of COVID‑19 charts how a decade of fiscal retrenchment hollowed out the social determinants of health: schools, welfare, housing, and left the young uniquely exposed. Yet the argument belongs, above all, to Britain.
If a Labour Government is serious about reviving Nye Bevan’s founding promise, it must treat the fate of this cohort as the litmus test of its moral seriousness. The Socialist Health Association (SHA) has spent eight decades arguing that health is made in parliaments, pay packets and primary schools long before it is saved in hospitals. The pandemic proved the point beyond reasonable doubt; the question now is whether Westminster has the courage to act, like it had done in times past.
When Labour rewired the state:
- 1945–51: The Attlee settlement. Confronted by the devastation of war, Labour mobilised a 250 per cent debt-to-GDP economy to found the NHS, extend the 1944 Education Act and erect the modern welfare state. The result was a 30-year rise in life expectancy unrivalled in British history.
- 1997–2010: The New Labour anti-poverty drive. Programmes such as Sure Start, the National Minimum Wage and Child Tax Credits halved child-poverty rates, while record school investment narrowed the GCSE attainment gap to its smallest on record. IFS evaluation showed that every £1 spent on early-years services returned up to £9 in later earnings and reduced public-service demand.
Both moments remind us that structural reform hinges on three pre-conditions: political will, institutional innovation and progressive taxation. Their absence since 2010 explains why today’s under-25s face the largest fall in living standards of any cohort since the 1930s.
The reckoning in numbers:
- By 2023 disadvantaged pupils in England were 19 months behind their peers at GCSE —an attainment gap that had narrowed before 2010 but widened inexorably after cuts and lockdown disruption.
- The Office for National Statistics records moderate‑to‑severe depression in 24 per cent of 16‑ to 24‑year‑olds, the highest since records began.
- Black pupils were twice as likely as their white peers to lose a close relative to COVID‑19; new‑arrival households faced food insecurity rates unseen in post‑war Britain, often excluded from mainstream welfare.
Learning loss is not a mere technical problem: it is biological. Childhood cognitive setbacks track strongly with higher adult incidence of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and premature mortality. The longer this damage is ignored, the heavier the NHS bill: and the wider the gulf between rhetoric and reality.
The Hayre Doctrine—five tests for a Government that refuses to sacrifice its young:
- The Equity Dividend: legislate a Child Health & Education Sovereign Fund, financed by a 2 per cent net‑wealth levy on the top decile, to bankroll universal, nutritionally balanced free school meals 365 days a year; establish a statutory 100 Mbps “right to bandwidth” for every household; and automate early‑years funding so that money follows deprivation in real time.
- Nutritional Sovereignty: pass a National Children’s Food Guarantee ensuring every child a weekly basket of fresh produce priced at least 20 per cent below market through state procurement; expand the sugar‑and‑salt levy and plough the receipts directly into fruit‑and‑veg subsidies, extinguishing the food‑bank boom.
- Homes as Health Infrastructure: empower local authorities with first‑refusal rights over long‑term vacant property, converting it into zero‑carbon cooperative housing for under‑30s with rents capped at one‑quarter of the real living wage and on‑site mental‑health teams.
- The Health‑First Work‑week: introduce a four‑day, 32‑hour standard with no wage loss up to the median salary; require employer mental‑health audits; and impose a £50‑per‑employee levy for non‑compliance, ring‑fenced for community psychiatry: an investment that the WHO estimates returns £4 for every £1 spent.
- The Intergenerational Equity Ledger: create an Office for Future Generations with a binding veto over any fiscal or regulatory act that worsens life‑course health outcomes or net‑carbon debt for the under‑25s; mandate that every Budget carry a public, distributional health‑impact scorecard.
None of this is utopian. Learning regained yields lifetime earnings uplifts worth £8 billion to the exchequer: an internal rate of return no Treasury bean‑counter could scorn.
From Lost to Reclaimed:
The pandemic has already rewritten our sense of the possible. Governments that once preached fiscal fatalism discovered quantitative easing on a wartime scale; rough sleepers were housed overnight in hotels that had stood half‑empty for years. The question; therefore, is not capacity, but will.
Health socialism has always insisted that freedom is hollow without material security, and equality is the pre‑condition of liberty. If Labour internalises that lesson, with the facilitation of the SHA, the Lost Generation may yet become the Reclaimed Generation: living proof that a nation can correct its course when confronted with the moral clarity of catastrophe.
Failure would consign today’s under‑25s to carry the compound interest of our policy myopia; success would lay the cornerstone of a healthier, fairer Britain, vindicating Bevan’s maxim that society only flourishes when the weakest are shielded first.
Dr Jatinder Hayre is an academic medical doctor and public‑health researcher. His new book, The Lost Generation of COVID‑19 (Routledge, 2025), examines the pandemic’s long tail of disadvantage and sets out a programme of structural reform.
