Britain's unemployment rate is hitting five-year highs, but here's the number that tells the real story of where we've been: the economy has only just recovered to where it was six years ago.

GDP reached £33,121 per person in 2025, finally surpassing the £33,000 mark we last saw in 2019. (Source: Office for National Statistics, GDP quarterly estimate) That's six years to get back to square one. Six years of your working life where Britain, economically speaking, went nowhere.

In 2019, before anyone had heard of COVID-19, the average Briton generated £33,000 worth of economic activity. Then came the collapse. By 2021, we'd dropped to £31,442. That's £1,558 less economic output per person. In a country of 67 million people, that's over £100 billion of lost economic activity.

The climb back started in 2022, inching up to £32,469. But 2023 told the real story of Britain's struggles. Despite all the talk of recovery, GDP per person actually fell to £32,400. While the rest of the world moved forward, Britain moved backwards.

2024 brought modest progress to £32,591. Still below where we started. Still trailing our 2019 selves. Then 2025: the breakthrough year that took us to £33,121 and finally past that pre-pandemic peak.

This isn't just about numbers on a spreadsheet. This timeline explains why everything feels harder now than it did six years ago. Why your wages don't stretch as far. Why public services feel more stretched. Why businesses struggle to invest. For six years, Britain wasn't growing its way out of problems. It was treading water.

The unemployment figures making headlines today make more sense in this context. When an economy spends six years going nowhere, jobs become scarcer. When GDP per person barely budges, there's less money flowing through the system to create opportunities.

Other countries didn't lose half a decade. The US economy grew throughout this period. So did many European nations. Britain uniquely managed to combine a pandemic shock with a cost-of-living crisis, political chaos, and Brexit disruption into one lost decade.

We're finally moving again. But six years is a long time to stand still. That's university and your first job. That's your thirties. That's the years when you're supposed to be building something. Instead, Britain spent them rebuilding what it already had.