Reeves Plans Fast Track Crackdown on Sickness Benefits

We have heard many clients and friends mention that ‘mental health’ and ‘depression and anxiety’ are the new ‘bad backs’ when you go to see your GP and finally Chancellor Rachel Reeves appears to have finally recognised.

It was under the Conservative Government that plans to tighten up on sickness benefits were first ‘muted’ with Rishi Sunak labelling it a ‘sicknote culture’ with plans to overhaul the benefits system to ensure people who are fit to work aren’t left behind on benefits i.e., some people being better off not working and also to introduce a ‘Fit note system’ to be reviewed after 11 million fit notes issued last year with 94% written off as unfit to work including removing a GP’s ability to issue sick notes due to unprecedented rises in inactivity due to long term sickness with nearly a third of working age adults being inactive.  Labour representatives were appalled at this but clearly ‘the worm has turned’ with Chancellor Reeves suggesting over the weekend that ’We cannot afford to keep footing the bill’ and she is going to fast track a sickness benefits crackdown to get the UK back into work.

Labour has now criticised the Tories to allow the sickness benefits bill to rise to nearly £65bn on incapacity and disability benefits, a sum that is greater than our defence budget when in power, yet it was Labour that ‘railed’ against this when in opposition.

The crackdown on sickness benefits will form part of speech later this week designed to get the UK growing again alongside making planning applications easier for new builds and change of use as well as a number of training incentives to get people away from minimum wage, unskilled jobs.  A full report on how this will be implemented will follow in March.

Comment

We welcome any moves to get many of the 10 million working age adults that are not working back to work that could work.  That said, this will be an interesting challenge given many governments have failed and more recently, how hard Reeves hit employers with employers’ national insurance contribution increases to 15% and the threshold at which employers pay NIC reduced to just £5,000 when employees do not start paying until their salaries hit £9,100.  Add to this, the new Employment Rights Bill.  Does Mrs Reeves really think employers are going to help when many employers are laying people off now as they cannot afford to pay them?

We suggest there should be a National and Community Service system to give people a sense of meaning and self worth.  We do not just mean military service as many may be physically incapable of this but perhaps a community service system.

• National Service with basic military training (for the defence of our country) as well as special ‘bolt on’ training such as vehicle maintenance, electricity/gas supply, communications, teaching, physical training, HGV driving courses, medical training, logistics or other routes that give younger people skills and qualifications for adult life.
• Community Service – we are sure there are many able-bodied people and even some in wheelchairs that can answer a telephone for a helpline on benefits or other charitable/community causes or even cook a meal twice a week for an elderly neighbour or a disabled person that just needs a lift into town or their shopping doing or even some company.
• Land Army or Street Army, we only have to look back to WW II to note that 200,000 ‘land girls’ went to work on farms to help farmers with food production that could be expanded to local community farms and garden allotment projects.  It is no huge leap to get many inactive people doing something, even if it is ‘Keeping Britain Tidy’ by tidying up our streets or cleaning graffiti off walls or maintaining public parks with gardening courses or lifeguards at a swimming pool or beach.
• No Active Community Input = no money or reduced money.  We do not mean people should starve and we have suggested on a number of occasions that basic food supply deals could be arranged by the government with large retailers so that basic nutrition is supplied at a huge 'economy of scale' saving in costs.  It could be that any person that is deemed able to work in community or land army or military service and refuses to do so even in just a simple form of visiting an elderly neighbour, should get a basic balanced diet food delivery each week but with no ‘leisure’ monetary benefits that then get spent on gambling, smoking or alcohol (sorry we are not trying to sterotype all people that claim sickness benefits as alcoholics or gamblers).

We know the above sounds ‘Draconian’ and we are not suggesting reform should be as harsh as the above but there may be some interesting lines to pursue with any of the above ideas.  We all too often see people that could work and don’t and any number of 'carrots' that you dangle in front of some people will not work.  Is it time for a ‘stick’?

We also suggest they should stop being called "benefits" or "credits" and be called something like 'temporary support' or 'stop gap payments' or 'conditional payment' or 'temporary income supplement TIS' that gradually reduces over time as do many employer health insurance schemes to encourage people back to work.