Rebalancing the System: Rethinking Economic Inactivity and Policy Culture in Northern Ireland

In a society where nearly one in four working-age adults is economically inactive, the question is no longer whether we need change, but whether we are structurally capable of delivering it.

Northern Ireland’s economic inactivity rate remains the highest in the UK. Despite decades of policy attention, the underlying causes are well documented: long-term sickness, caring responsibilities, early retirement, and low engagement in adult learning persist. The challenge is not a lack of data or diagnosis. It is a question of political will, institutional agility, and cultural readiness to act.

A System Designed to Sustain the Status Quo?
Northern Ireland’s public sector is large by any comparative measure. The Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) employs over 23,000 people, and public sector employment accounts for more than a quarter of the workforce, far higher than in England or the Republic of Ireland. This scale brings stability, but it also brings inertia.

The NICS is predominantly middle-class, degree-educated, and urban-based. It is a system that, by design or default, reflects the values and priorities of those who work within it. This is not a critique of individuals, but of a culture that prizes process over outcomes, and continuity over disruption.

Too often, policy is shaped by what is administratively convenient rather than what is socially transformative. Investment flows to institutions that already exist, rather than to the communities that need them most. The result is a system that manages disadvantage rather than resolving it.

The Cost of Comfort
This middle-class policy bias manifests in subtle but powerful ways. Funding for Further Education (FE) colleges—those most likely to serve economically inactive adults—is consistently lower than for universities. Health spending prioritises acute care over prevention. Employment programmes focus on those closest to the labour market, not those furthest from it.

The cost of this comfort is hard to properly estimate, if it is extrapolated from wider UK data the cost of economic inactivity to Northern Ireland is between £6.7 and £9.2billion! This is a combination of lost economic output, public spending on welfare and health interventions, foregone tax revenues and the social costs of higher crime rates (sustained by the scourge of so-called paramilitarism) mental health impacts and the burden of caregiving, which impacts women disproportionality. 

Meanwhile, the people most affected by economic inactivity, older workers with health conditions, women with caring responsibilities, young people without qualifications remain on the margins of policy design. Their voices are rarely heard in the rooms where decisions are made. 

Learning from Elsewhere
Contrast this with the Basque Country in Spain. There, economic inactivity among working-age adults is around 15%, almost half the rate in Northern Ireland. The difference is not demographic; it is strategic.

The Basque model integrates vocational education, employment services, and social care. FE colleges are empowered to co-design curricula with employers. Modular, flexible learning is the norm. Occupational health is embedded in job centres. And most importantly, the system is designed around the needs of people, not the convenience of institutions.

A Call to Leadership
Northern Ireland does not lack talent, compassion, or creativity. What it lacks is a system that rewards boldness and centres lived experience. We need a civil service that reflects the diversity of the society it serves. We need policymaking that is co-designed with communities, not just consulted after the fact. And we need investment that is judged by its impact, not its alignment with existing structures.

This is not a call for revolution, but for rebalancing. For shifting the gravitational pull of the system away from the centre and toward the edges. For recognising that the status quo is not neutral, it is a choice. And it is a choice we can no longer afford to make.

The Conversation Starts Here
This note and thoughts contained is not a conclusion. It is an invitation, an invitation to everyone in Northern Ireland,  politicians, civil servants, educators, and citizens. An invitation to ask harder questions and imagine better answers. What would it take to build a system that truly works for everyone? And what are we prepared to change to get there? 

The measure of who we are, is what we do, with what we have – Vince Lombardi