Margaret Thatcher is often credited with reviving Britain’s ailing economy in the 1980s. But what has happened in the former coalfields since the mines closed?
Most of Britain’s miners went on strike in 1984 after plans were announced for the closure of uneconomic pits, with the loss of 20,000 jobs.
The year-long dispute culminated in defeat for the strikers and the end of Britain’s large-scale mining industry.
When the strike began, the nationalised coal industry employed 171,000 miners at 170 collieries in England and Wales and had a total workforce of 221,000. Ten years after the strike ended, nearly 90 per cent of the workforce had gone.
This was de-industrialisation on a scale Britain had never experienced. So what has happened to those dependent on jobs in the mining industry?
According to a study carried out by a team at Sheffield Hallam University, the industry shed 222,000 male jobs between 1981 and 2004. But this was offset by an increase of 132,400 male jobs in other industries and services in the same areas.
Compared with miners’ wages, many of these jobs – in distributuion and call centres – are poorly paid.
And the researchers from Sheffield Hallam have also highlighted the concept of worklessness in these communities. While claimant count unemployment fell during the 1990s, “hidden unemployment” rose, with big increases in the numbers of men claiming incapacity benefit (IB).
Most of these IB claimants are not seeking work and they are not included in the official unemployment statistics.
Okay, we’re not subsidising industry, but we’re paying to keep people on benefit instead. Prof Steve Fothergill, Sheffield Hallam University
This rise in economically inactive men represents “the single largest labour-market adjustment in the coalfields… between 1981 and 2001 these men doubled as a proportion of the total male population of working age, to more than one in five of all 16 to 64 year olds”.
The study reveals that “there are nearly five times as many people of working age in the coalfields who are out of work and claiming incapacity benefits as there are out of work and claiming unemployment benefits”.
Unemployment has not rocketed, partly because much of it is “hidden from view”.
But some areas have fared better than others at job creation, with Yorkshire, South Derbyshire/North West Leicestershire and North Warwickshire prospering and South Wales struggling.
David Hopper, general secretary of the Durham Miners' Association, spent all of his working life at Wearmouth pit.
When Margaret Thatcher's death was announced, he said: "There's no sympathy from me for what she did to our community. She destroyed our community, our villages and our people.
"Our children have got no jobs and the community is full of problems. There's no work and no money and it's very sad the legacy she has left behind."
Margaret Thatcher felt the “uneconomic” mining industry was a drain on the taxpayer and duly privatised it, but any savings made have to be seen in the context of the social costs to the communities affected and the resulting benefits bill.
It is the same story in other areas hit by the loss of heavy industry and manufacturing. So was it all worth it? Not according to Professor Steve Fothergill, an economist at Sheffield Hallam University and one of the authors of the report.
“I would unequivocally say no because we destroyed so much productive potential in the economy in those years and we did it in sectors we could really do with now to improve our trading performance in the world,” he told Channel 4 News.
“Okay, we’re not subsidising industry, but we’re paying to keep people on benefit instead. We need an improved trading performance, selling more to the rest of the world, like Germany. But our capacity to do this has been affected because so much has been lost.”
Prof Fothergill said large-scale job losses were “a crucifying blow to many of those areas”, which had still not fully recovered.
“As a generalisation, they had good quality, tolerably secure, well-paid jobs being replaced by new jobs, but often poorly paid and insecure.”
While jobs were created in these areas during the 1990s and early 2000s, many of them in the public sector, “they still bear the scars in terms of worklessness”, with up to 18 per cent of working-age people out of the labour market and living on unemployment and disability benefits.
The Sheffield Hallam report was published in 2005, 20 years after the end of the miners’ strike. Three years later, Britain was in recession as a result of the banking collapse, and the economy is still bumping along the bottom.
How have these communities fared since? “Until the recession of 2008, there were quite successful efforts at regeneration, with some places doing better than others. My hunch is that the progress from 1993-08 has probably come to a juddering halt,” said Prof Fothergill.