(Bloomberg) --

Britain’s over 50s were most likely to leave the workforce in the pandemic, suggesting most of the more than half million employees who fell out of the jobs market won’t come back.

A surge in economic inactivity where people are out of work and not looking for a job is part of what’s tightened the U.K. jobs market, pushing up wages and fanning inflation. The government and Bank of England are looking for ways to loosen that pressure and halt the rise in prices across the economy that’s coming from higher wages.

Findings published by the Office for National Statistics on Monday showed about 493,000 of the people that joined the rolls of the inactive since the start of 2020 were over 50, making 94.4% of the total, the ONS in a series of reports based on the labor force survey.

Early in the pandemic, it was young people who fell out of the jobs market, with 229,000 becoming inactive from the fourth quarter of 2019 to the first quarter of 2021. Since then, their inactivity rate has fallen back to pre-pandemic levels while the rate for the over 50s has grown.

Retirement was the biggest reason given by older people who quit working, but the next leading causes were Covid-19 and illness or disability. Others cited stress or said they lost their jobs and couldn’t find a new one.

©2022 Bloomberg L.P.