‘500,000 to lose sick pay as welfare reforms bite’. Those words boom from the front-page
of the Times this morning – and they’re based on an article by Iain Duncan Smith (£) in which he admits
that some 23 percent of the country’s 2.1 million Incapacity Benefit claimants could be found fit for work. This, it is said, should save the Exchequer some £4 billion.
The numbers are striking enough, but the policy behind them shouldn’t be surprising at all. Even the last Labour government intended to reverse a political deceit that they had nurtured, but which was birthed during the Thatcher years: the artificial swelling of the sickness rolls. And the coalition has long planned to put rocket boosters under that process. Provisional figures, released in July, even suggested that 40 percent of IB claimants could be shifted back into the labour market.
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