Rising levels of mental ill health are causing the UK welfare bill to balloon, new economic research suggests.
More than half of the rise in 16 to 64-year-olds claiming disability benefits since the pandemic is for claims relating to mental health or behavioural conditions, according to a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).
Chancellor Rachel Reeves is working on cuts to the welfare budget ahead of her Spring Statement, as the Labour government looks to reduce the £65bn bill for health-related benefits.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has been trying to rally his MPs to support the move, first on Monday night, and again at a Downing Street briefing on Wednesday morning.
In the UK 1.3m people now claim disability benefits primarily for mental health or behavioural conditions – 44% of all claimants, the IFS found.
The rise has been accelerating since the Covid pandemic.
Sir Keir has called the current benefits system “unsustainable, indefensible and unfair”, discouraging people from working while producing a “spiralling bill”.
Expected cuts could fall on Personal Independent Payments (PIP), which provides help with extra living costs to those with a long-term physical or mental health condition, and cuts to incapacity benefits for people unable to work and receiving Universal Credit (UC).
Labour MPs representing the so-called Red Wall are particularly supportive of plans to reduce the numbers of people claiming benefits, including Bassetlaw MP Jo White, who told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme there was “a moral duty to change people’s lives”.
“It’s a generational thing – if families are out of work they tend to bring up their children to exist on the benefits system,” she said.
“People slide along on that low level of income, perhaps dipping into the black market, but their aspirations are so low and the communities do not change.”
Tackling this issue through changing the welfare system “is absolutely critical”, White argued, because in order to ” lift people out of poverty… they need to be in work”.
But significant numbers of Labour colleagues are unhappy. Nottingham East MP Nadia Whittome told the BBC her party was “getting it badly wrong on this” and suggested “taxing the super-rich” as an alternative.
“We cannot go back” to the “narrative of strivers versus skivers”, she said, adding “we should not be placing that burden on disabled people who have already borne the brunt of 14 years of austerity and we can make different political choices.”
Asked if she would rebel over the issue, Whittome said: “I was on these benefits – my mum had to stop work when I was a teenager to care for me.
“I represent disabled people, all of us do, and we all hear their stories every day and just how scared they are about this and what a difference these payments make to their lives.
“I can’t look my constituents in the eye, I can’t look my mum in the eye, and support this.”
Many Labour MPs who spoke to the BBC have said they agreed many people currently on disability benefits could work and should.
But they worried the government’s rumoured plans, such as freezing Personal Independence Payments, would punish all those on disability benefits, including those with severe disabilities who could never work.
That would be “unforgivable”, one MP told the BBC.
Another said making it more difficult to access disability payments was “not what the Labour party ought to be about”.
“It’s our very DNA that Labour was created to lift people out of difficult circumstances,” they said.
“The government needs to stop talking about everyone who is on disability benefits as if they are all the same because they are not,” said another.
The IFS has forecast the welfare bill will increase to £100bn before the next general election.
Exploring the reasons behind the rise, which has “accelerated” since the pandemic, researchers said the UK was an outlier compared to other countries, none of which have seen the same level of post-pandemic increases in health-related benefit claims.
Researchers found particularly fast growth in new disability benefit claims for learning disability and autism spectrum claims.
There was also evidence of increasing levels of severe mental health problems.
There is a heightened rate of mortality among working age people, due to “deaths of despair”- either by suicide, alcohol or drug misuse – and such deaths are much more likely if someone has a mental health illness.
Trades Union Congress (TUC) general secretary Paul Nowak said slashing welfare for disabled people would “only make the current challenges worse”.
He urged Labour not to cut PIP, which he said enables many disabled people to access work rather than relying on benefits, but he backed reforms to a “one-size-fits all approach” towards one that provides tailored employment support.
“Trade unions share the government’s ambitions to improve the nation’s health and to help more people into good quality work,” he said.
“A major lesson from the Tory years is that austerity damaged the nation’s health – we must not make the same mistake again.”
