How the U.K.’s Sickness Benefits Trap Britons

If middle-class workers were offered significantly more money for signing off sick with depression or anxiety, how many would persist with their not-always interesting jobs?

Letter to the WSJ. 

"The U.K. welfare situation, if anything, is worse than you suggest in your editorial “The Crisis of the Welfare State in Profile” (July 7). Some 3,000 Britons a day are being signed on to a long-term sickness benefit from which they are unlikely to emerge. This typically offers more money and security than full-time work at the minimum wage. The puzzle, surely, isn’t why so many people claim but why so many still work.

I made a film about this last year, arguing that this is a story of good people caught in a bad system. The government invites citizens to take the money: There is an 80% success rate, with 63% put on the highest tier. In-person interviews have been replaced with a cursory phone call, whose questions and accepted answers are easily found online.

It’s easy to be shocked at the figures, but they aren’t difficult to understand. If middle-class workers were offered significantly more money for signing off sick with depression or anxiety, how many would persist with their not-always-interesting jobs?

Last week’s parliamentary debacle shows that Prime Minister Keir Starmer has lost control. He needs to reduce the onflow, but the welfare system is guarded by activists who successfully sue government ministers who try to reform.

We know what will happen now. Mr. Starmer’s own officials project that 4.1 million will be on out-of-work sickness benefit by the next election, up from 3.5 million today. The waste of money, while shocking, isn’t as scandalous as the waste of life, the disfigurement of local economies. A quarter of Birmingham, the U.K.’s second city, is now on out-of-work benefits. In Manchester, Glasgow and Liverpool, it’s 1 in 5. The resulting vacuum in the labor market has sucked in unprecedented levels of immigration.

The result isn’t simply social and economic calamity but the conditions for a political backlash far deeper than the country experienced last year.

Fraser Nelson

London

Mr. Nelson is a columnist for the Times of London."