'Almost a million benefit claimants want to return to work': Welfare reform can’t wait, writes Sir Iain Duncan Smith

17 March 2025, 19:19

By Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP

To govern is to choose and against the backdrop of an increasingly unsafe world, the need to invest significantly more in defence and a flatlining economy, further reform of welfare is a necessity.

When I resigned from Cameron’s government, welfare stood at £61.6bn, yet by the end of this parliament, it is projected to be £108.7bn. Sickness benefit alone which was £19bn in 2016 is set to rise to £32bn. So it is with disability benefit, set to rise from £11bn to some £31bn.

Some of that rise is because Judge-led tribunals in disability appeals led to 60 per cent of appeals getting approved for benefits when DWP had previously rejected their claim.

Covid and the lockdowns have had an enormous negative impact on the welfare bill but that isn’t the whole issue. Behind these numbers, are real people. They are rising because, for example, the number of workless households with children, where all adults are economically inactive, has risen by 141,000 since 2016.

These are real families with real lives who no longer have the hope and purpose that comes with getting up and going to work each morning.

General Practitioners tell me that they struggle to know how to deal with the influx of patients claiming they suffer from anxiety and depression.

In 2023, over half of those economically inactive reported depression, bad nerves or anxiety and a quarter of a million 16- to 34-year-olds are economically inactive, up a quarter.

A vast majority of GPs agree that society’s approach to mental health has led to the normal ups and downs of life being seen as medical problems, too often prescribing when non-pharmaceutical interventions would be more suitable, medicalising things they would prefer not to.

Looking even deeper, the same Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) research found that many of the mental health problems presenting in our young people find their roots in the breakdown of family life.

Family stability is the best predictor of good mental health in children.

One analysis of NHS England data has found that, among 11- to 16-year-olds whose parents were married, 12 per cent had a mental disorder, compared with 27 per cent of 11- to 16-year-olds who had a lone parent.

This is not to criticise those who struggle to bring up children on their own but to highlight the pressure such breakdown causes.

In just a few short decades, the marriage rate has declined by two-thirds and our economic activity figures are starting to bear witness to the results.

Tackling the generational changes in family structure is a long-term endeavour, we could get ahead of things immediately by putting jobcentre staff in schools to speak to 12- and 13-year-olds tomorrow.

It’s not about career advice; it’s giving them a line of sight to a paying job in their local area.

The job centre knows what kind of jobs and apprenticeships are available and explaining what their prospects are with and without qualifications to students who question the need for school in their early teens helps re-set their aspirations to earn.

Short-term attempts to freeze or cut benefits for limited savings, without significant reform, as set out in the latest report by the CSJ, “How to Get Britain Working”, will not reduce the growing bill in the longer term.

Yet, with sickness benefit, (ESA), coming into Universal Credit, the opportunity for radical change is there.

Now for the first time claimants will have a jobs advisor with them helping and urging them back into work.

We know 700,000 claimants want to return to work and this help will reduce the overall cost of benefits and increase tax receipts to the treasury.

We must then look to longer term reform of the way we do things such as the judge-led tribunal system. But unless we address some of the underlying questions of how we function as a society, we will leave too many without aspiration or hope.

Whilst work remains the best route out of poverty, the Chancellor’s rise in National Insurance just made that route out of benefits a lot tougher.

It’s much harder to get a car moving when you put the handbrake on at the same time.

Sir Iain Duncan Smith MP is the Chairman of the Centre for Social Justice.

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