Collapse of ‘zombie’ UK firms forecast to fuel unemployment in 2026

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jan/05/collapse-zombie-companies-uk-rise-unemployment?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Posted by topotaul

5 Comments

  1. Hollywood-is-DOA on

    Let’s talk about zombie job roles, that the job centre expect people to apply for, just so they get the stats up, given to them by the government.

  2. “There are early and encouraging signs of a mild zombie apocalypse, where higher interest rates and minimum wages have combined to kill off struggling firms and leave the door open for new, more productive ones to replace them,”

    What a very positive spinned way to say we’re going to lose a bunch of businesses. It’s going to get a little cold if nobody enters that door for a while.

  3. Bestusernamesaregon on

    Tbh – the UK is in dire need of this. Productivity can’t grow with zombie firms and they were kept alive for many years with virtually no borrowing costs and low interest rates. Now creative destruction can resume

  4. People will be surprised by some “zombie companies”. For example we all know the AA but for years now it’s been carrying insane levels of debt, at one point £2.6bn when it was only making a profit of £100mn a year.

    I think the failure of the AA would be like a new “Woolworths” for the British public.

  5. crappy_entrepreneur on

    This is a good thing, actually.

    A decade or more of very low interest rates and incredibly low borrowing costs meant that unproductive companies were able to survive much longer than they should, keeping labour locked up in companies where they weren’t actually doing anything useful.

    If these collapse and allocate their Human Resources to actually productive companies that are competitive, this is good for productivity.