The crisis is the expected surge in the number of people on welfare. Control that, resume reassessment, and you save lives and money - without taking away support from anyone who needs and deserves it. How? I discussed with Evan Davis on Radio4 last night (above) but the story involves people and numbers. Substack allows these to be woven together. Here goes:-
The DWP’s forecasts under the current system are as per below: 500,000 more written off as too sick to work by the next election. A calamity.
This is, primarily, a crisis of wasted lives. But it has been brought to a head by the DWP’s projected cost, barely changed by its latest cost-cutting proposals.
Politically, it’s hard to take money away - MPs rebel. But morally it’s also hard to do. In my last Times column I mention Amy, who has played by the rules and done everything right. She wants to work but needs help. Starmer’s big mistake is treating her as a cost to be cut, rather than a citizen to be helped.
It’s also hard and expensive to help those who have been on welfare for more than a year. Far better to stop it before it starts, but here is the calamity. Under the Tories some 2,000 were being written off every working day. I looked up the figures last week: it has risen to 3,000 under Labour. Here’s the breakdown.
This can be stemmed by tightening basic procedure. First, return to in-person assessments and trust the assessors. One, an ex-Army nurse, tells me of her dismay when she learned that the phone interviews she was conducting were so easily gamed.
Next, end the scam that incentivises the DWP Assessors to sign people off as long-term sick. A former assessor (an ex-NHS nurse) explains it to me here:-
Finally, bring back reassessments. Sickness benefit is supposed to be reassessed after 18 months or so - once, this was leading to 350 a day being moved back to work. Now, it’s less than 50.
Even people who want to come off sickness benefit are being told: no, you have to keep accepting the money (and accompanying restrictions) until you are reassessed. Gavin, below, is a taxi driver who had been waiting three years (!) when he spoke to me:-
The above is a scandal, trapping people who should be helped and perpetuating rather than fighting poverty. This is why Keir Starmer richly deserves this rebellion: it’s a miserable excuse for the reform that people like Amy and Gavin deserve. If the PM cannot work out that his job is to save lives first - if he does, the money looks after itself - then he’ll find (as Boris Johnson did) that a massive majority offers no protection when the reckoning comes.
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