How Liz Kendall can stop this national sickness

Times

15 hours ago

The welfare trap has become so vast and bewildering — an incomprehensible maze of acronyms and despair — that it's easy to lose sight of those trapped inside it. Keir Starmer, like others before him, ended up losing his way in the institutional fog. The Treasury needed savings so welfare cuts were ordered to provide them. But no one seemed to ask the most basic question: what about the people? How would MPs explain the cuts to them, and others? And in what possible way would this be politically deliverable?
Take Amy, a single mother in Keighley I met last year while filming a documentary. During childbirth, her pelvis fractured. Multiple surgeries have left her walking (with a stick) but in constant pain. Incapacity benefit lets her care for her eight-year-old son and provide something rare in her part of town: a stable home. Still only 30, Amy is bright and eager to train. She once wanted to be a barrister. But she has never worked and has no idea how to start, nor has anyone offered serious help.
Starmer's welfare reform would cut payments significantly from next April: the promised 'employment support' looks paltry and unlikely to reach Amy. This is a Treasury raid, disguised as welfare reform. Official forecasts admit that the sickness benefit surge will continue apace: 3.3 million at the last count, 4.1 million within five years. So the obvious mission — reverse the rise — will not be accomplished. Labour rebels were right to reject this combination of penny-pinching, ineptitude and lack of ambition.
People like Amy are the hardest cases: the longer you're on welfare, the harder it is to get off. So the first, easiest, most urgent task should be to reduce the rise in sickness benefit claimants. The old, shocking statistic was that 2,000 were being signed off every working day under the Tories. The figures were updated this week: under Labour it's now closer to 3,000 a day. Lives are being squandered on a scale that's hard to fathom and harder to forgive.
Once on sickness benefits, claimants are unlikely to work again. This is especially tragic given how many under-35s are claiming: up 60 per cent in five years. It would be callous, if those in charge realised what was going on. Which, even now, they largely don't.
Jeremy Hunt, a former chancellor, is a case in point. He recently claimed to be responsible for the sickness benefit surge because, as health secretary, he gave mental health the same status as physical health. But his mea culpa was wrong. A steady fall in sickness benefit claimants, which started under Blair, was suddenly and viciously reversed not following Hunt's 2014 Care Act but in 2019. Why? The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has gone into this in detail. The answer lies in bureaucratic mistakes that were never spotted and lie uncorrected even now.
During lockdown, in-person interviews for sickness benefits were replaced with cheaper phone interviews. The new system had a big, unexpected side effect. Assessors told me the prospect of a sit-down interview deters those who are, actually, not too sick to work. Large numbers of them dropped their claims at the last minute. But a phone call? Far less daunting, especially if it's a scripted process that can be easily gamed — and whose questions (and accepted answers) are now all online.
Something dull and technical — a reduction in the pre-interview dropout rate — is responsible for a half a million extra sickness benefit awards since 2019. But that figure accounts for only half of the overall surge of one million extra awards in that time.
Another factor is the rise in approval rates, now at 80 per cent, double the 2010 level. Why so high? Assessors are incentivised to get through as many claims as they can, and are paid an £80 bonus for every one over a certain minimum. The only way of speeding up is to assess someone as too sick to work. Do so and you can 'curtail' — end the interview — and move on to the next claim. You can be hauled up for rejections (in case the claimant appeals) but approvals are almost never checked. One assessor, a former NHS nurse, told me how appalled he was that the interviews are not recorded. This, he said, leaves the system wide open to abuse.
Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, could fix this now. Tell all applicants their interview will be in-person. Switch to a phone call last minute if needs be, but restore that deterrent effect. Record and spot-check all claims, not just rejected ones. Publish all sickness benefit data, daily. How many applied, and were approved? How many bonuses were paid? Such transparency could be transformative. A Covid-style live-data dashboard would focus minds more than any ministerial edict.
Last autumn I met Gavin, a taxi driver on the south coast who told the DWP he did not need his sickness benefits any more. No, he was told: you must wait to be reassessed. Three years later, he was still waiting. What he didn't know was that reassessments were stopped in lockdown — and were never properly restarted. Once, 350 a day were moved back into work this way. Now, it's just 50 a day.
Reassessments would not threaten people such as Amy, whose case is all too verifiable. No vote is needed in parliament. Kendall has been increasing them, but by nowhere like enough. She does not need new laws, just grip. And to rediscover a sense of urgency, a willingness to take on activists. This is about duty both to the taxpayer and to those stuck in the system.
Not long ago, Britain led the world on welfare reform and it was Labour that started the process. The problem isn't a workshy population but a broken system, one that forgets its purpose, loses sight of the individual and now traps more than it helps. The real sickness is political: a kind of fatalism that says welfare is too big to fix, that no one can grip it and that any remedy must wait for some distant white paper.
Reassessments, deterrents, scrutiny, transparency — none of these are radical ideas. They worked before and can be made to work again. This isn't about whether Starmer can pass legislation but whether he can govern. Whether he sees the likes of Amy not as costs to be reduced but as citizens to be helped. This was, once, the founding purpose of his party. If a prime minister forgets that purpose, then no majority, however large, will save him when the reckoning comes.