Suella Braverman is right about welfare

At a time of a worker shortage, we are somehow managing to keep 5.3 million people on out-of-work benefits. This is too much, says Suella Braverman. My colleague Stephen Daisley fervently disagrees and in his riposte, he quotes various figures about how Britain doesn’t spend very much on welfare compared to other countries. This is precisely what New Labour argued when it was keeping five million on benefits throughout the boom years and the argument didn’t stack up then either. The below shows the problem to which Braverman alludes: it really is quite a scandal and points to massive government failure.

Set aside the wasted money: keeping 5.3 million working-age people in out-of-work benefits in a period of job vacancy abundance is a waste of lives and potential. The Tories actually managed to tackle this before Covid, moving the participation rate – the number of people in work– to a record high of 64.4