The Jobs Recovery Has a Blind Spot

The government is putting money where its growth ambitions are. A new £150m fund for start-ups and scale-ups in the North of England has just been announced, and on paper it looks like exactly the kind of intervention the UK economy needs.

But look at who this recovery is actually built for, and a gap starts to show. While ministers back tomorrow's businesses, today's unemployed older workers are being left to fend for themselves.

Where the money is going

Chancellor Rachel Healey has launched a £150m northern scale-up fund, aimed at backing university spin-outs and early-stage businesses across Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle.

The logic is sound. Devolution only works if regional economies have capital to grow, and university research has long struggled to convert into commercial success outside London and the South East. This fund is meant to close that gap.

It's a targeted, ambitious move. Nobody should argue against backing innovation in the North.

Who gets left out

Here's the problem: growth funds for start-ups don't help the people currently falling out of the workforce altogether.

A charity has urged the government to act on rising later-life unemployment, warning that more older workers are becoming economically inactive — not in employment, education or training — with no meaningful policy response in sight.

This isn't a niche issue. It's a structural one. Older workers who lose jobs face longer periods out of work than younger counterparts, often due to age discrimination, skills mismatches, or simply being overlooked in hiring pipelines built around younger, "high-growth" talent.

The contrast is stark:

£150m committed to fund the next generation of start-ups
No comparable commitment to re-employing the generation already being pushed out of the workforce

Both are legitimate economic priorities. Only one is currently funded.

Why this matters for the recovery narrative

Growth funds make good headlines. Scale-up capital, spin-outs, regional investment — it all fits a story about a forward-looking economy.

But a jobs recovery that only counts new jobs, not the people who've lost old ones, isn't a full recovery. It's a partial one dressed up as progress.

If later-life unemployment keeps rising unaddressed, the economic cost isn't abstract:

Lost productivity — experienced workers sidelined instead of retrained or redeployed.
Higher welfare dependency — economic inactivity doesn't resolve itself; it compounds.
Weaker regional growth — the same northern cities targeted for start-up investment also have older workforces who need reintegration, not just innovation funding.

You can't build a resilient labour market by only investing in one end of it.

What a fuller strategy would look like

A serious jobs strategy wouldn't choose between backing start-ups and supporting older workers. It would do both, deliberately.

That means:

Extending regional growth funding criteria to include age-inclusive hiring incentives for scale-ups receiving public money.
Requiring transparency from funded businesses on workforce age diversity, not just headcount growth.
Pairing capital investment with retraining support for workers over 50, tied to the same regional priorities driving the scale-up fund.

None of this is complicated. It's a matter of political will, not economic possibility.

Key takeaways

The government's £150m northern scale-up fund is a strong, targeted investment in regional innovation — but it's not a jobs strategy on its own.
Later-life unemployment is rising, and campaigners say the government has yet to respond with any comparable action.
A genuine jobs recovery needs to address both ends of the labour market: the businesses of tomorrow and the workers being left behind today.
Regional growth funding could be strengthened by tying it to age-inclusive hiring and retraining commitments, not just start-up capital.