UK
Why are so many more people claiming out of work benefits?
FEBRUARY 12, 2025
By Merry Cross
Disability activists Ellen Clifford has won a case against the Department of Work and Pensions in the High Court. The judge declared unlawful a rushed consultation about reducing benefits for disabled and ill people. One reason for the judge’s decision (though there were several) was that the rationale purported to be about getting more people into work, whereas in fact the primary purpose was to cut back welfare spending. Yet within days of this win, the current Government declared their intention to stick to these spending cuts and the media had no apparent interest in why it was all happening.
One of the many things about the mass media that is hugely irritating is their thoughtless parroting of the figures on welfare benefits. ‘The cost has grown too much because far too many people are claiming for disability and sickness and we need to reduce the amount we’re spending on it.’
Can we please consider the context for the rise in claims for Personal Independence Payments and incapacity benefits since 2018/19? Simply stating the problem as it stands without doing so, allows us to point the finger at the recipients or applicants for the rise, and that is victim-blaming, pure and simple.
The dates quoted should ring a pandemic bell for most people. We know that the previous Government under Boris Johnson handled the pandemic disastrously badly. School closures also caused many children to feel isolated and damaged their mental health, their education and attainments. The Government delayed imposing a lockdown; they paid millions for useless Personal Protective Equipment; they sent pensioners who had contracted Covid in hospital back into nursing homes, causing many more to catch and die from Covid; many doctors, nursing and care staff contracted it unnecessarily and many were left with Long Covid.
The Office for National Statistics estimated that in 2024 there were about 2 million people with Long Covid. Some of the symptoms of Long Covid are now thought by scientists to resemble or be linked to Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) also called CFS or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (National Institutes of Health report, 2023). 4.5% Covid 19 sufferers met ME/CFS criteria compared to 0.6% who had not had Covid.
Now factor in the anxiety thousands of us suffer as we become more and more aware of being on the brink of climate disaster, with the 1.5% increase in temperature linked to a tipping point in the planet’s ability to adapt already breached. In this age of access to multiple media outlets, it is almost impossible to be ignorant of the lives, homes and livelihoods lost to floods, storms and wildfires all around the world.
How about the impact on our mental health of the threat of homelessness which rose exponentially under the last Government? Every single family that rents their home must have been worried by this and every single person, particularly the children, made homeless will have suffered massively from the disruption to their social lives, their education and of course their sense of security.
The rise in hate crime against Muslims and Jews was 25% in 2024 according to Government statistics, and trans people are also being targeted. It must be taking its toll on the mental health of these groups, as is the paucity of health services for trans adults and youngsters. Some trans people have left work because of the strength of the discrimination they face there.
Is all this enough to justify the rise in those with anxiety and other mental health issues? What about the fact that jobs are not easy to find (and will only get more scarce with the increased use of AI, so favoured by Sir Keir Starmer) even if you are in the best of health; or the fact that university qualifications don’t necessarily lead to any job despite students having many thousands of pounds of debt? It makes a fiction out of the Government’s claims that cutting access to benefits will get more people into work. In fact the current system is quite cruel enough, with assessments, sanctions and mistakes by the Department for Work and Pensions costing too many people their physical or mental health and even their lives see The Department by John Pring 2024).
And which age-group within society is most likely to have mental distress? It’s teenagers of course, the group that this and the last Government most complain about for being out of work. Yet the funding and resources for mental health services have been savaged over recent years, with a report by the Children’s Commissioner in March 2024 stating that almost a quarter of a million children who had been referred for treatment in 2023 were still waiting.
So let us stop blaming individuals for claiming welfare payments and seek solutions to at least some of these potent and destructive factors in the rise of the numbers of claimants. We must therefore welcome the forthcoming legislation to prevent the use of no-blame evictions.
First of all, the Government could alleviate the financial pressure on themselves and all of us by taxing large corporations and the super-rich proportionately. Second, it could start legal proceedings (if it hasn’t done so already) to recoup funds lost to payments for useless Personal Protective Equipment. Third ,the Treasury could dramatically increase funding and resources for mental health services. Fourth, the Government could support much greater efforts to replace plastics with non-toxic, biodegradable products.
Perhaps most important of all it could stop pandering to the fossil fuel industry and help us all feel there might be hope for the future.
All of this is to say that pointing the finger at sick and disabled people and pushing them even further into poverty is not only immoral – it would likely backfire and cause even more ill health.
Merry Cross has been a disability activist for fifty years and was among the first members of Disabled People Against Cuts, of which she also chaired a local branch for ten years.
Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/europealacarte/8449673837. Licence: Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0)
