It didn’t take long, did it, for the pundits (self included) who identified Sir Keir Starmer as the Labour answer to Margaret Thatcher (strong on defence, tough on welfare) to do a rapid rethink. No sooner did the Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, intimate that she’d be freezing Pips – the personal independence payments which aren’t means-tested and which you can claim if you’re employed – as part of a larger reassessment of benefits, than Sir Keir does that very un-Thatcherite manoeuvre, a U-turn. Labour MPs and frontbenchers, including, it seems, Ed Miliband, bolstered by the Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham, made their way to the PM’s office to kick up about the changes, and Sir Keir buckled. Pips would not squeak after all.
Well, we’ll see tomorrow when Liz Kendall unveils her proposals for cutting the welfare budget whether Labour is serious about welfare reform and specifically about addressing the quite extraordinary increase in claims based on mental health. Wes Streeting, the Health Secretary, pointed out the obvious truth that there has been “overdiagnosis” of mental health conditions as a result of which, too many people have been “written off” as unfit for work. That’s obviously true in many cases. Although Wes can’t possibly say this, another way of looking at it is that many people have been diagnosed with mental health problems so that they can obtain benefits.
How else would you interpret the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ finding that 1.3 million people of working age are claiming benefits for conditions such as depression and anxiety? That’s nearly twice as many as a decade ago. It is considered bad taste to contest these problems but how would you account for numbers almost doubling in ten years? Is our situation so much more anxiety-making than it was a decade ago? I mean during the Cold war we lived in the perpetual shadow of nuclear annihilation but we didn’t all identify as having mental health issues. Could it be that lockdown had a lot to do with it? For one of the disastrous, culture-changing aspects of the government’s response to the pandemic was that people got it into their heads that working for your living was optional. You could sit at home, toying with a laptop, and the government sent payment right home to you.
And that comes at a price. The cost of long-term sickness and disability benefits for working-age people has risen by £20 billion since the pandemic, and the Office for Budget Responsibility suggests that annual spending on health and disability benefits will reach £100.7 billion by 2029-30.
Then there’s the other aspect of the thing, that 1.2 million young people are claiming sickness benefits. It seems 18 to 24-year-olds are 40 per cent more likely than older generations to give poor mental health as a reason for quitting work. According to PwC, the accountancy firm, a third of those classed as 'economically inactive' are 'not interested' in returning to jobs — with 37 per cent saying low 'self-esteem and confidence' acts as a barrier. It concludes that considering leaving work has 'gone mainstream'. I ask you, is there any of us, apart from Liz Truss and Rory Stewart, who does not occasionally suffer from low self-confidence?
The obvious truth is that the less often you venture near a workplace, the more likely you are to find these places offputting
As I may have suggested before, this amounts to medicalising the human condition. And the obvious truth is that the less often you venture near a workplace, the more likely you are to find these places offputting. There are, you know, vacancies out there that we’re importing people to fill. The real problem may be not the explosion in mental health problems but as the Daily Mail inimitably put it, The Death of the Work Ethic.
The head of Citizens’ Advice says that there is a terrifically demanding process for getting paid benefits on the basis of mental health. I don’t know about that. A trawl through the various websites suggests that if you are prepared to take the trouble to assert that you find everyday life challenging, you can surmount those hurdles, especially since the websites advise that if you are insufficiently fragile to make it to an interview, you can apply in writing.
A friend of mine works for a number of London surgeries, and he sees the inflation in mental health diagnoses at first hand: one woman patient got a prescription for depression and obtained pills, which she then flushed down the loo. But she got her mental health-related payments. It’s one individual instance, but there’s a lot of it happening. I went to my GP a while back for a HRT prescription; the doctor on duty offered me anti-depressants instead: what was clear is that it isn’t difficult to get this stuff. I know people who genuinely suffer from depression, and their condition is pitiable; it doesn’t do them favours when millions are Me-Too depressives.
A risk-free foray into work, whereby people could return to benefits if it didn’t work out, could be genuinely helpful
To understand where the Government is coming from on this, watch the recent documentary on this subject by Fraser Nelson, former editor of The Spectator, for Channel 4. Note particularly the reaction of Liz Kendall, Work and Pensions Secretary, to his devastating findings. One option canvassed in the programme was for disability claimants to have the option of a risk-free foray into work, whereby they could return to benefits if it didn’t work out. That could be genuinely helpful.
So, let’s see whether Liz Kendall and ultimately the PM have the will to face down their dissident backbenchers in cutting benefits claims on the basis of mental health. If you can’t make unpopular choices when you have a majority of over 150, when can you make them? We can’t carry on like this.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
