Sickness benefits: an unaffordable burden?

Whitney Ainscough claims to make £500,000 a year through her social media posts, said Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. She's one of a new band of online "sickfluencers" who make a living out of instructing people how to game the welfare system.

Statistics suggest they're doing a roaring trade. Around 3,000 Britons a day are joining the list of those on long-term sickness benefits. The total number of claimants is forecast to soar from 3.5 million to 4.1 million by the end of this Parliament; the fastest rise has been among 16-to 25-year-olds. And in 2023 in Birmingham, fully a quarter of working-age adults were inactive. The problem can be traced back largely to lockdown, when many workers learnt how simple it was to make claims, and when "face-to-face benefits interviews were replaced by telephone assessments, where claimants find it much easier to lie". In a speech last week decrying the trend, Kemi Badenoch warned that the UK was in danger of becoming a "welfare state with an economy attached".

The Tory leader has a point, said Daniel Herring on CapX. The sickness benefits bill is set to hit £100 billion by 2030. A recent analysis projects that claimants on the top rate would be £2,500 better off a year than a full-time worker on the living wage. Some reforms to the system are clearly needed, said Andrew Marr in The New Statesman. Ministers should have done a better job of explaining this and preparing the ground for changes. Instead, they sought this month to bundle through rushed, illogical welfare cuts from which they were subsequently forced to retreat. This created needless fear and suspicion, fostering the belief that Labour leaders were "going after wheelchair users and those in chronic pain".

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It will be difficult for the Government to pursue decisive reforms in this area in the wake of its welfare bill "debacle", said The Times. And there seems little prospect of Reform UK taking up the cause: the party is "unwisely tilting leftwards when it comes to public spending, in its desire to appeal to disenchanted Labour supporters". This creates an opening for Badenoch, who dismissed Nigel Farage last week as Jeremy Corbyn "with a pint and a cigarette". She is right to argue that, with 28 million in the private sector now supporting 13 million retirees, six million public sector workers and 11 million simply not working, the situation is unsustainable. The nation is heading for a "financial crunch", and the welfare bill is at the heart of the problem. "The time for hard truths is fast approaching."