The contagion of idleness is rampant. It is an evil in need of a cure
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
By tradition we wheel out at this point in the political cycle the cliché that no Budget ever won a general election. The next one, indeed, looks so monumentally lost by the Conservatives that whatever Jeremy Hunt presents next Wednesday is unlikely to make any difference.
The Office for Budget Responsibility expects public spending to reach £1,189 billion in 2023-24, with receipts at £1,058 billion; a deficit of £132 billion.
Britain is, after nearly 14 years of Conservative-led government, running a bigger welfare state than ever. “Our” widely non-functioning National Health Service gobbles up £176 billion; state pensions £124 billion; Universal Credit £83 billion; and ‘other welfare’ £87.2 billion. In that last figure are included disability benefits totalling £35.3 billion. The OBR says two-thirds of that amount are paid to people of working age.
The Conservatives are now so terrified of being perceived to disoblige claimants that, for all the rhetoric about tightening up eligibility for welfare payments, the traffic is entirely in the opposite direction.
The Government seems to have created a right to be idle at the state’s expense, allowing young people to opt out of the workforce.
This eats up taxpayers’ money, reduces revenues, depletes productivity and rots prosperity.
Incidentally, last June the then-immigration minister, Robert Jenrick, told the Commons that failure to curb illegal migration would, by 2026, cost Britain £11 billion a year in “asylum support”, 10 times the cost in 2021.
It is the greatest failure of this Government that this permissive attitude to rights, as opposed to responsibilities, has drained money from the productive sectors of the economy in these appalling ways.
The “right” to state-funded idleness is deeply economically, and even worse morally, corrosive. By last November 2.8 million people were idle because of long-term sickness, up from 1.97 million before the pandemic.
At the last spring Budget, Mr Hunt said 490,000 more people were economically inactive than in 2019. Within months another 200,000 had joined them. Mental health was the most commonly-cited reason. Depression, bad nerves, anxiety or other mental illnesses accounted for almost a quarter of the 2.8 million, with 37 per cent claiming physical incapacitation. I do not seek to mock the afflicted, but this is getting beyond belief.
Although most long-term sick are over 50, the most marked increase was among those aged between 16 and 34: up by 140,000, compared with 32,000 for those between 35 and 49.
This, as well as rising ill health among workers, is a £16 billion cost to the Treasury in welfare and health care support.
Some have physical injuries stopping them from doing their old jobs. The first resort should be to ensure the NHS treats them swiftly, the second to ensure they are found, and take, a job commensurate with their abilities.
Retiring in his 30s with the taxpayer picking up the tab because a man can’t carry a hod or climb a ladder is simply unfeasible.
Nearly 570,000 of the 2.8 million said they expected to work again. If just a quarter of the 267,000 of those claiming universal credit could re-enter employment it would save the Treasury £1 billion a year, according to the Institute for Employment Studies.
In the last quarter of last year, 9.3 per cent of men aged between 25 and 34 were economically inactive, compared with 7.6 per cent in the previous quarter.
The mental health question is inevitably more delicate. Some people have grave problems that push them to the verge of suicide, and they require support and compassion.
But the definition of mental illness becomes ever broader.
People who claim that going to work is “traumatic”, or whose misfortunes have made them unhappy, must learn to deal with such things: they cannot expect the state to subsidise their failure to get a grip.
What is worse is that the state appears to have accepted a duty to fund people of working age, physically fit and simply unwilling to learn resilience.
It has no such duty, and one of the numerous absurdities of a peculiarly 21st century attitude to life is for it to imagine it does.
Even if 570,000 of the long-term sick expect to work again, it means over 2.2 million don’t.
The drain this imposes on an economy would be unsustainable at any time; with the country struggling to right itself after a pandemic that became an epic of economic mismanagement, it is lethal.
A senior opposition MP, when I asked him recently what we could expect from a Labour government, answered: “Five years of managed decline”.
He said they couldn’t revive the economy by ending the welfare state’s suffocation of individual effort because “the welfare state is why people vote for us”.
The shadow work and benefits secretary Liz Kendall – one of Labour’s most intelligent and sensible politicians – recently met a group of think-tanks, one of whom, the Institute for Public Policy Research, told her that 14.4 million people were “in poverty”; but spending £12 billion would lift a million out of it.
The best way to lift people out of poverty is not to lard them with welfare benefits, but to find ways to return them to work.
Sometimes, the stick may prove more useful than the carrot.
But if the Tories have lacked the guts, leadership and vision to remove the right to be idle at the public’s expense, imagine just how much more impoverished our economy will become under the caring, redistributive hand of the impending Starmer terror.
