Out-of-work benefits total hits 6.5m

The DWP’s quietly updated database reveals a calamity: in Birmingham, Liverpool and Blackpool a quarter of working-age adults are signed off.

The UK keeps meticulous welfare records but they can only be accessed by querying StatXplore, the DWP’s near-impenetrable database. It has just been quietly updated. Officially 1.67 million are claimant unemployment. But widen that to all of those on hidden unemployment - sickness benefits, etc - and the total has surpassed 6.5 million for the first time in history.

There has been no announcement. There never is. The August StatXplore update has a six-month (!) data lag. You can see why there’s no rush and no fanfare: the resulting picture is one of calamity. Rather than a post-pandemic recovery, the welfare caseload has grown a lot worse. The picture is below: “UC out-of-work” includes new sickness benefit, coming on top of the 1.3m still on the old incapacity benefit.

The above would be an economic catastrophe if the UK was not able to import workers to take the place of those signed off on benefits. This is my critique of mass immigration: economically, it works too well. It allows us to cover up the cracks in our economy and ignore those who have fallen through.

Welfare dependency clusters in certain areas but the disparity between cities is now quite astonishing: Birmingham and Liverpool especially. Here’s how they look after the new update.

Some 27pc of Blackpool are now on out-of-work benefits. In Birmingham, our nation’s second city, it’s 25pc. In Liverpool, 23pc: closer to a quarter than a fifth - and not so far from the 28 per cent that Liverpool saw in the 1930s. We called that a Great Depression. We don’t call it anything now: we have learned to look the other way. These figures can be broken down for any British areas (here’s how to do it) and I provide a community-level summary at the bottom of this post.

The age breakdown.

When my Ch4 documentary on welfare was filmed I spoke to benefits assessors who said the hardest part of their job was having to sign young people off as long-term sick. Once you stay on these benefits for a year or so you’re unlikely to ever work again. To condemn a 50-year-old man to this fate is bad enough, but a young woman who had never worked? Yet this is what assessors are asked to do: with a cursory phone call assessment. If approved (80pc are) they are unlikely to hear from anyone in officialdom again: the cheque-and-forget policy. Given the fateful implications of a sickness-benefit diagnosis, these deserve a far more in-depth assessment and several follow-ups.

The new data suggests a record 235,000 under-25s are now claiming out-of-work sickness benefit. NB, as far as records can attest, most of those who are signed on never work again.

All disability and sickness benefit

So far, we have only discussed out-of-work benefits. But you can claim other disability benefits (such as Personal Independence Payment or PIP) if you’re in work. Factor this in and astonishing 11 per cent of the British working-age population now is now on disability or sickness benefits of some type. Here are the figures from the August update:-

It’s a straight line upwards: and where will it stop? The PIP vote debacle seems to have halted Keir Starmer’s attempts to reform welfare. So it’s worth republishing DWP forecasts from April on the official forecasts of the cost of this epidemic.

The waste of money is tragic, but the waste of human potential is far worse. Here is a table of the worst-affected communities (so-called Middle Super Output Areas or MSOAs). There are parts of Glasgow, Blackpool and Grimsby where more than 50 per cent are on out-of-work benefits. The table lets you sort by various metrics and by country.

The centre of Birkenhead is now one of the worst-affected parts of the Britain: a community lying just the other side of the water from the Exhibition Centre in Liverpool where this year’s Labour Party conference starts in just a few weeks.

I’d like to think that this juxtaposition will be the prompt for much discussion about what is going wrong - and what can be done. But I’m not optimistic. This is about hidden unemployment: people airbrushed out of the unemployment figures and, ergo, the national debate.

Plenty can be done. I suggest nine quick fixes here, but the first step towards fixing a problem is to acknowledge its existence. Until someone in parliament cites the 6.5 million figure - which is drawn from DWP methodology - then we’re some distance away from that first base.

(PS All of the above figures are now on my data library, which I have as part of my Substack. If anyone wants to follow up, drop me an email.)

PPS: How to replicate The figures are so high - and almost never reported - that I’m often asked if they can be deal. This analysis takes DWP definitions and methodology and updates using Stat-Xplore. It’s fiddly, but not difficult. How to replicate:-

• Bypass the StatXplore password request by clicking ‘Guest log in’ to enter an Aladdin’s Cave of welfare data.

• Look up the dataset ‘Benefit Combinations – Data from May 2019 for England and Wales'.

• Click Table 5, then click ‘Open table’ to get the numbers. A wheel appears while it computes, then the following table is revealed for ‘out of work’ benefit combinations.

• Add the figures in the right-hand column (excluding the ‘Not on Out of Work Benefits’ row). Do the same with the Scotland dataset to reproduce the GB total of 6.5 million.

Importantly, there is no overlap: people do claim more than one benefit, but each person is counted only once and placed in the category of the highest amount they receive.

PPS The updated data can be broken down by Westminster constituency and local authority: again, the DWP supplies welfare figures and you can get a ratio by looking up the working-age population breakdown. Results below.