Now that I’m no longer editor of this magazine, I can admit that I spent the election night of 1997 cheering on Tony Blair. Reader, it gets worse. I didn’t particularly want a Labour government but I badly wanted the devolution they had promised. A parliament in Edinburgh would, I thought, consider why the East End of Glasgow – home to many of my extended family – had some of the worst deprivation in Europe. Drugs deaths, unemployment, crime, all ignored by Westminster, would surely be remedied by the new politicians in Holyrood.
There are lots of organisations to help people sign on, but those who want to get back to work are on their own
How naive that was. Scotland’s drug-death toll has since risen fivefold and the welfare situation has worsened. Grimsby, Birkenhead, Blackpool and the Wirral have all followed the trail blazed by Glasgow.
My time as a political journalist has helped me understand why. Politicians, like everyone else, respond to incentives – and there is barely any incentive to resolve sickness benefit. If an attempt to fix benefits goes wrong (as it always does), you will be greeted with the worst headlines. You’ll be accused of taking money away from the poorest, most desperate people in society. The safest option is to sound angry and promise reform – just not yet.
Liz Kendall, the Work and Pensions Secretary, maintained this long tradition when she declared that welfare needs to be fixed, but we’ll have to wait until next year to hear what her plans are. She’s quite right in her analysis: the system she inherited is a debacle, it doesn’t work for anyone. The question is whether the system can be reformed or whether approving as many as 3,000 people a day for sickness benefits means it is simply out of control.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been making a documentary about this for Channel 4. Britain’s Benefits Scandal hears from some of those affected – people who are often missing from the debate. We have 3.2 million trapped in a system in which they are given a decent payout – some I spoke to said about £1,300 a month, some significantly more – but who want to get back to work. Yet they risk losing everything if they attempt to do so. Even training for a new trade puts you at risk of being reassessed.
Most people I spoke to were recovering from mental health episodes, and saw work as the next step, but the support they need is not there. There are plenty of organisations that are funded to help people sign on to benefits – but those who want to get back to work are on their own. They had imagined the situation would be temporary, then are astonished to find themselves written off. The money comes but help does not. We met an alcoholic who is given assistance to sign on (‘I had six or seven cans this morning before I could even function,’ he says) but there’s no sign of the intervention he obviously really needs. It’s far from clear whether isolation from work is really the best thing for people like him, and for the anxious or depressed. But the system continues unchanged.
The fact is that categorising people as sick makes them ignorable because they are no longer counted in the unemployment figures. Under Boris Johnson, the number of people on sickness benefits rose from 2.5 million to three million. (In Sweden, which avoided lockdown, the number fell.) But on his last day as prime minister, Johnson boasted about having cut unemployment to its lowest level since the 1970s. Andrew Bailey, the Bank of England Governor, recently told an audience in Italy that the UK is ‘at or near full employment’. But a fifth of Birmingham, Glasgow and Manchester are on out-of-work benefits, as are 5.8 million people nationally. No MP of any party has mentioned that figure in the Commons.
The Tories will find this hard to campaign on, given that the disaster unfolded on their watch. Iain Duncan Smith succeeded in taming unemployment when he was work and pensions secretary, but another welfare revolution was needed for sickness benefit. It never happened. Reform is now even harder to implement because of the Tories’ failure to slash the legalistic weeds around this, meaning charities can sue the government using judicial review. In the last government, Mel Stride’s welfare changes were held up by this, and Kendall faces the same onslaught. Charities such as Scope are ready to accuse her of ‘a full-on assault on disabled people’.
When Blair considered incapacity benefit – asking the late Frank Field to ‘think the unthinkable’ on welfare reform – disability campaigners chained themselves to the railings of parliament. That scared him off. He had come into office thinking he had to make changes (as Bill Clinton had done in America) to expand the workforce and grow the economy. But soon a demographic shift began – mass migration. For the first time, it became politically viable to shove people on to benefits and still grow the economy.
Every day that welfare reform is delayed means losing – quite literally – thousands of people to a sickness benefit system from which very many are unlikely to emerge. If Kendall comes up with the perfect reform plan next year, it may not be proposed until the 2027 Budget, and various Rwanda-style legal challenges could push it into 2028. By that time the UK is forecast to have 4.1 million on out-of-work sickness benefit, up from 3.2 million last year, at a cost of an extra £5 billion a year.
The best idea, incidentally, has come not from any political party but from Barnsley council, whose investigation into its workforce shortage and welfare pile-up made an important discovery. Its survey showed that far more of those categorised as sick wanted to work than didn’t. ‘This is a huge pool of unused talent,’ its report found. ‘If our research findings in Barnsley were applied nationally, it would suggest there may be more than 4.5 million in the market for a job now or in the future.’ This is where Keir Starmer would find economic growth. The opportunity is clear. But whether there is the political will to seize it is another matter entirely.
Dispatches: Britain’s Benefits Scandal will be on Channel 4 on 2 December at 8 p.m.
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