There are some figures that are so strikingly off the scale – the cost of HS2, say, or levels of immigration – that you think there must be a nought too much or a decimal point missing. But no, the digits are correct: the number of people claiming disability benefits in Britain will increase by 750,000 – that’s three quarters of a million – over the next five years.
That’s not the numbers claiming benefits; it’s the increase in the numbers of claimants. I know what you’re going to say – Liz Kendall, Work and Pensions Secretary, is sorting out benefits (and is being demonised as a cross between Cruella de Ville and Mrs Thatcher for her pains) so that figure can’t be right. But the impact assessment of the benefits changes by civil servants has found that even with the reforms there will still be a huge increase in claimants by 2030. The cost will increase from £23 billion to £30 billion a year.
You know why, don’t you? It’s because of the huge increase in claimants with mental health conditions. Plus, obviously, an increase in the rate of fraud. Let’s run through the overall figures: there are five million people in England and Wales currently claiming disability benefits, including 3.7 million receiving Personal Independence Payments (Pips).
Liz Kendall recently said that there are 1,000 new Pips awards every day. Not year; day. Her reforms to the payment will raise the threshold for awards and a cut to the sickness-related element of Universal Credit – the bit whereby people can get extra if they have a “limited capacity to work”. That will save £5 billion a year, but that’s less than the projected increase in spending on benefits by 2030.
The 3.3 million on long term sickness benefits has in fact increased by a million people in just five years. Query; do you really and truly believe that a million more people are seriously sick than five years ago? I take a different view. Five years ago there was Covid when everyone stayed at home and found that it was actually rather handy to have money sent to you for doing nothing; I think that habit stuck, one of the umpteen disastrous consequences of lockdown. Our present benefits bill is, I surmise, an attempt by lots of people to replicate that agreeable state of affairs.
Of course it’s also that far more people have discovered the usefully elastic concept of mental illness and how all embracing it is. Nearly half of claimants cite mental health or behavioural issues, while 86% of them say they have a mental health condition, and I would bet my overdraft that an awful lot of them are either lying or have persuaded themselves that they can’t quite cope with the struggle for existence.
What seems plain is that we can’t go on like this
Of course mental illness is a reality: I have friends with clinical depression and I do know a little what it’s like and it’s not feeling very stressed at the thought of having to get up and go to work in the morning or feeling not really able to cope. If there’s one way of getting the bill down, it’s excluding non-physical disabilities from the qualification for sickness benefit other than the really serious, psychologically assessed cases. Raising the bar very very high, in other words.
If you don’t believe me, watch Fraser Nelson’s brilliant documentary for Channel 4 on the benefits scandal. He found that the system is weighted against those who would like to try to work, but can’t for fear of losing benefits. There was one intelligent young woman who had been ambitious, but felt a stable income on benefits was preferable to the risk of seeking employment; she knew the hoops she had to jump through to maintain it.
He suggested a jobseeker’s allowance should be no less than long term sickness benefits; most of us would think that it should pay more. The balance is all wrong; people are fearful of taking the risk of training or employment for fear of losing out. And then of course, there’s the anecdotal evidence of people who game the system, who know exactly what they need to do to get benefits, and get it, quite often with another job on the side. Fraser Nelson’s documentary interviewed one company in a high benefit area which couldn’t actually attract staff…and umpteen London employers would echo the complaint.
What seems plain is that we can’t go on like this. For the price of paying people to stay out of work we could actually pay the electricity bills of the pottery factories in Stoke on Trent that are going out of business because of energy costs; we could make manufacturing industry pay. There are a thousand better ways for the state to spend our money, including taking less of it. St Paul has rather gone out of fashion lately, but there’s one thing he said which we should ponder: If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat. I suppose it’s too much to hope that it might be the motto for the Department for Work and Pensions?
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
