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Keir Starmer’s government is expected to announce a host of cuts to sickness and disability support in the coming days. The UK’s ageing and increasingly unwell population has led to what has been described as “unsustainable” and “indefensible” spending on benefits.
As researchers of poverty and welfare reform, we find it both shocking and sadly unsurprising that, after more than a decade of cuts to social security, the government seems to have once again decided that austerity is the answer to the economic pressures they are facing.
We have spent many years documenting the real harms created by reforms to social security. It was disappointing to hear Starmer describe Britain’s social security system as an expensive way to “trap” people on welfare, rather than helping them find work.
The expected proposals are intended to incentivise people into work, by reducing the generosity of support offered to people claiming disability-related benefits. But in reality, many of the measures already implemented to reduce spending by cutting or capping benefits have pushed people further away from the labour market.
The relationship between welfare and work is more complex than it first appears. Around 37% of people on universal credit are currently in work.
Approximately 23% of those out of work are engaging with advisers whose job is to support them back into the labour market. The majority of the rest of universal credit claimants are people who are not expected to be in work – often people who have health challenges that make it difficult for them to work most jobs.
The UK’s social security payments cover a much smaller proportion of the average wage than most other countries in Europe.
A single person’s allowance on universal credit is £393.45 per month if they are 25 or over, while under-25s receive £311.68. This averages out at less than £100 a week to meet all essential living costs, bar support with housing.
Disabled people received additional support in the form of personal independence payments (Pip) or disability living allowance if you live in England, Wales or Northern Ireland, and adult or child disability payments in Scotland.
This support is designed to help people meet the additional costs that come with disabilities and long-term health conditions. It is not means-tested, and is available to people in employment as well as those not currently working.
Ministers are expected to make it more difficult to access Pip, freezing its value so this does not rise with inflation, and to reduce the amount of universal credit received by those judged unable to work. These proposals are likely to face strong opposition from many Labour MPs.
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Currently, if people are not able to engage in paid work for long periods, they are entitled to an additional payment through universal credit. This amount – equivalent to approximately £400 a month – could go down. The problem is that this is already not enough to live on, and often necessitates going without essentials, such as food or electricity.
Families with dependent children receive additional support through child elements of universal credit, and through child benefit. But this support is subject to caps – the controversial and poverty-producing two-child limit, and the benefit cap, which restricts the support any household can receive where no one is working or claiming disability benefits.
Our research has shown that these restrictions do not work. The two-child limit is not helping families get into work, and nor is it affecting whether families have more children.
The benefit cap harms mental health, pushes people deep into poverty, and increases economic inactivity. Both policies are punitive and, in our view, need to be removed.
Other reforms to disability-related social security have left people hungry, pushed people into economic inactivity, increased depression, and may have even raised the suicide rate.
Getting Britain working?
The government is trying to solve the wrong problem. They are focusing on those who are out of work, when it is increasingly clear that one big reason people with disabilities are not in employment is because work environments have fewer roles they can fill.
While spending on disability-related support has gone up in recent years, the overall welfare bill has not. On top of that, the proportion of people who are not in work and who are claiming disability-related social security is actually about the same as it has been for the last 40 years. Indeed, the fact it is so low, given population ageing, could be read as good news.
There have also been wider changes in the labour market. There has been a rapid decline in “light work”, like lift attendants, cinema ushers, or low-physical exertion roles in factories. As work environments have become more intense, people with disabilities have found it increasingly difficult to stay in work.
So, what would work to entice more people into work? The truth is we know far more about what does not work than what does.
The best evidence we have right now suggests that making it more difficult to claim social security and placing more strenuous work-search requirements on claimants will simply push people with poor health (particularly mental ill-health) further away from the labour market.
The welfare narrative
Behind the cuts currently being trailed is a popular but ill-founded logic which views social security as the cause of the country’s economic woes. Welfare itself is seen as the problem, with whole generations supposedly left parked on what is depicted as too-easy-to-claim and too-generous support.
But this narrative grossly misrepresents what it’s actually like to try and claim social security. It is, in fact, notoriously complex. Often, this complexity is intentional.
Making accessing social security difficult is not necessarily (or always) about meanness, but this “nasty strategy” is a product of a system that assumes that many people are not eligible for the support they claim.
The system has always assessed eligibility for benefits, but the way these assessments have been done in recent years has often been experienced as degrading and dehumanising. On the flip side, some have claimed that people are not being assessed regularly enough, and suggest that some people who have claimed benefits in the past may now be fit to work.
Where this is true is unclear, but the failure to reassess is also a product of cuts to this system – so taking more money out will not address this problem either.
Britain’s social security system has been stripped to the bones: it provides neither security nor enough support to those who receive it, and is ripe for reform. But the reform required is not of the type Labour is proposing, which will succeed only in further decimating what little remains of our social security safety net.
This article was co-published with LSE Blogs at the London School of Economics.
Ruth Patrick receives funding for her research from organisations including Nuffield Foundation, The Robertson Trust, Trust for London, Abrdn Financial Fairness Trust and Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Ruth is a member of the Labour Party.
Aaron Reeves has received funding from the European Research Council, Nuffield Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust.
