The director’s new film, Sorry We Missed You, couldn’t be more timely. We ask MPs and business leaders including Frank Field and Anna Soubry what they make of its uncompromising vision
• Q&A with Sorry We Missed You actor Debbie Honeywood
It’s three years since Ken Loach released I, Daniel Blake, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for its searing depiction of austerity-era
Britain, with food banks a dismal fact of life and a benefits system that crushes rather than supports its supposed beneficiaries.
Now Loach has turned his attention to another dehumanising trap of our neoliberal age: the world of zero-hours contracts. Sorry We Missed You, again set in Newcastle, tells the story of Ricky and Abbie, a fortysomething couple with two kids whose problems are less to do with finding work than stopping it from eating up their lives. Abbie, played by first-time actor Debbie Honeywood, is a home carer who covers the cost of her own travel between appointments and whose crammed schedule makes it impossible for her to bestow proper care on her vulnerable “clients”.