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It has taken six and a bit years, but last week brought confirmation that UK plc was at last cranking out more goods and services than it had been before the crash. Second quarter output was up just 0.2% on early 2008, which doesn't sound like much to celebrate after so long. But with unemployment falling sharply, it would be churlish not to recognise the economic recovery's slow emergence as established fact.
What, however, of the accompanying "social recession" that, as opposition leader, David Cameron emphasised? Careful analysis of more than one data set confirms it was not merely an empty Cameronian phrase. GDP fell by a little over 7% after 2008, but in my book, Hard Times, I report that on some measures, volunteering dropped much more, by something closer to a fifth. Both the number of volunteers and the extent of their commitment slid with the economy.
Worst of all, this could not be explained away by cash-strapped families cutting back on travel or subscription fees to civic societies. The government collected excellent data on the full range of good deeds that friends and neighbours do for each other – from getting in groceries for a frail neighbour, to minding a toddler next door – and such spontaneous do-gooding fell away at least as fast as the formally organised sort.
The anxiety of the slump, it seemed, had got under the skin, leaving citizens hunkering down. A recovery marked by part-time posts, temping jobs and unreliable "self-employment" might seem unlikely to undo the damage. But, in fact, there are some signs that receding fears of redundancy have done something for community life. By early 2011, the volunteering decline had levelled off. After that, we need to be a bit careful, because our chief data source – the Department for Communities and Local Government citizenship survey – itself fell victim to hard times, through government cuts. But Cameron eventually brought in a cut-price replacement, the Cabinet Office's Community Life Survey, which suggests that civic life may have bounced back from the bottom.
The data discontinuity imposes one caveat and the temporary swelling of the figures by the volunteer-fuelled Olympics in 2012 another. The biggest problem, though, is that the encouraging signs are averages – that include many people in richer communities, where there was never any serious recessionary drop-off in volunteering. In poorer communities, where life was already more atomised, the collapse in community spirit was dramatic.
These, of course, were the very towns where redundancy notices were thrown around like confetti in 2008-9. And if we use tracking data to follow those youngsters thrown out of work during previous downturns into the recoveries that followed, we discover that their tendency to withdraw did not fade, but actually became more marked as the years went by. Where parenthood might otherwise have drawn them into school PTAs, and work might otherwise have drawn them into professional associations, unions or other clubs, after being knocked off life's track by redundancy, they remained – for decades – disproportionately inclined to stay home and bolt the door. Landing a new job, and particularly one that promises scant security, is not going to make good the damage done by the great rupturing of expectations that results when a blameless individual is suddenly thrown on the scrapheap.
In sum, it may well be that the economic recovery is also calling time on the social recession in many places. But in all those towns – the Barnsleys, the Pontypridds and the Nottinghams – that prosperous Britain forgot all about for so many years, social recovery will take much longer. There remains at least a danger that, instead of healing, the wounds of recession could settle into lasting scars.
• Tom Clark is author of Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump and a Guardian leader writer
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