The welfare bill

[cromwell]

Two million people have been claiming sickness benefits for at least five years without any requirement to look for work, official figures show.

Data published by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) show that in January more than 900,000 people had been claiming Universal Credit with no work conditions for five years or more.
Another 1.1m people were claiming Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) for at least five years as of August 2024, a legacy benefit also mostly handed to claimants who do not have to seek work.

Almost half of the Universal Credit claimants are under 40 (so over 400,000), suggesting an increasing number of people are headed for a life on benefits.

In total, at least 4m welfare claimants have no requirement to seek work following a huge increase since the pandemic at a cost to the taxpayer of around £30bn a year.

The statistics suggest that almost half of this group have been on benefits for at least five years.

These people are not required to attend work-related interviews or training because they have been assessed as being too ill for work.
More than 3m people are now claiming Universal Credit with no requirement to look for work, up from under 700,000 before lockdown in January 2020. The rest are long-term ESA claimants.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the Government’s tax and spending watchdog, estimates that among those with health problems only one in twenty return to work if they have been out of work for a year or longer.

We can't go on like this. I know that many of these claims will be genuine. But chucking money around at people who have never worked and whose family have never worked (and they do exist) and people who have absolutely no intention of ever working, has to stop.

[Workingman]

The IFS has a good article about this here: https://ifs.org.uk/news/42-million-work ... end-decade

This paragraph is ever so relevant:

Mental health and behavioural disorders are the most common condition affecting benefit claimants, representing the primary condition for 41% of recent disability benefit claimants. But this average masks substantial variation by age: for 69% of new 25-year-old claimants, mental health and behavioural disorders were their primary condition, while this was the case for just 22% of new 55-year-old claimants.

Mental health "conditions" have become the new gateway to benefits largely because they are so hard to debunk. Another problem with these benefits is that once given they are almost impossible to take away. Appeal after appeal to stop them being removed grind the system to a halt.

The whole thing needs looking at with clear guidelines for both claimants and assessors to work to.