CashNews.co
Former Tory PM Rishi Sunak decried the UK’s growing “sicknote culture”, but demonising people isn’t enough. Getting people back to work will be horrendously difficult, even in a growing economy.
Official unemployment figures give a misleading impression. The jobless rate was just 4.2% in June, well below the long-term average of 6.68%. The problem is that this doesn’t cover everybody who isn’t working.
A staggering 9.5million Brits are not registered as “unemployed”, because they’re not looking for work or available if offered one.
Instead, they’re labelled “economically inactive”.
That headline figure is misleading. It includes millions of students, early retirees, stay-at-home parents and carers. However, it also includes 2.8million who say they are too sick to work.
Their numbers have jumped by almost 500,000 in the last year alone, placing an even greater burden hard-pressed taxpayers.
So why is Britain so sick?
Some blame record-high NHS waiting lists saying people can’t get the treatment they need to go back to work. That’s only a small part of the picture, though.
More than half of those waiting for care are not of working age. Of those who are, only 650,000 are economically inactive due to long-term sickness.
That still leaves more than two million who are inactive but don’t need NHS treatment.
Obviously, many will be seriously ill or living with a disability. They’re in no fit state to work and probably never will be. Unhealthy lifestyles don’t help. We’re living for longer, but we’re getting sick earlier. Long Covid is a concern.
Honest claimants need all the support they can get. But the benefits system needs looking at, too.
Both New Labour and post-2010 Tory governments made claiming incapacity benefits harder. Yet after a number of controversial cases where people were declared fit to work only to die shortly afterwards, the system was eased.
In 2020, the number of successful claimants jumped from 35% a decade earlier to 80%.
Another issue is that people who are declared unfit to ever work again get more support than those still looking to work.
That gives people a real incentive to drop out of the workforce for good. Just one in 10 jobless people on benefits need to show they’re looking for work.
The result of these two measures? Long-term inactivity rates have rocketed by 476,000 in four years
Younger people are on the frontline.
The number of young people in England and Wales claiming disability benefits has doubled over the past decade to 1.2 million, according to the Resolution Foundation.
More than 682,000 received the Child Disability Living Allowance (DLA) in 2023, up from 333,000 in 2013.
Four in five children receiving the Child DLA had been diagnosed with a learning difficulty, behavioural disorder, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Covid lockdowns haven’t helped. Nor have rising child poverty, family breakdown, drugs, stagnating wages, collapsing high streets and everything else we’ve been through lately. But the UK’s rising “mental health” culture is also playing a part.
There’s a real danger that many could be claiming benefits for life. In some towns, children face a life of worklessness.
As the population ages and the worker-to-pensioner ratio shrinks, we can’t afford this. The cost of benefits supporting people with long-term health conditions is forecast to hit almost £80billion a year by 2028.
The human cost is incalculable.
Labour’s Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall has acknowledged that the situation is “dire”. She’s sworn to get employment back to pre-pandemic levels.
She blamed the Tories and fair enough but now it’s her responsibility. There’s no easy solution. Fixing this will be expensive. Anything controversial will meet massive resistance from an army of activists and campaigners.
Labour has been tough on pensioner benefits. Soon we’ll discover whether it can be equally tough on worklessness.