Keir Starmer faces a rebellion by Labour MPs, particularly those on the left of the party, who disagree with his planned changes to the benefits system – as George Eaton wrote about yesterday. However, new polling by Ipsos, shared exclusively with the New Statesman, suggests the public is more conservative on benefits – though it might not agree with Labour’s plan to fix them.
As sources explained to me for this week’s New Statesman cover story, the most worrying cause of worklessness in the UK is the number of people who are out of work due to ill health, and the most worrying members of that group are young people. This is the first time that large numbers of young people have dropped out of the workforce due to ill health. Much of this is due to mental health – 85 per cent of work capability assessments record a mental health condition.
The economists, civil servants and mental health workers I spoke to said it was important to take these claimants seriously, but the poll suggests the public is more sceptical. The most popular answers to the question of what has caused the sharp rise in working-age people receiving disability and health benefits was that more were “trying to cheat the system by claiming to have health conditions they don’t have”. The second-most popular answer was: “Society now sees more health conditions, eg mental health, as valid reasons for not working.”
The public’s belief in what works is also conservative. There was more support for making health-related benefits contingent on taking some action to seek work than there was for offering support but not requiring it.
This stems from a perception about what the welfare system is for: its most important priority as far as the public is concerned is providing security in retirement, while “treating claimants with respect and dignity” came further down the list.
The poll also suggests the public agrees that action needs to be taken. On every area, from providing a social safety net to tackling child poverty to supporting people back into work, the poll found more people considered the system to be working poorly than to be working well. It scored particularly poorly on providing value for taxpayers’ money.
But while the government is looking at mental health workers, work coaches and job centres, the public thinks there should be more practical responses. The most popular measure was to provide support for retraining. Fewer than one in five thought careers advice through job centres should be prioritised. The idea of simply cutting benefits was considered a priority by less than a third of respondents. Understandably, people who received benefits themselves, or had a family member who did, were much less likely to agree that reducing benefits would help push them into work. But even among those who have no contact with the benefits system, retraining people for in-demand jobs was considered more likely to be effective.
I’m sure that’s what the government would also like to be doing: training thousands of construction workers for its housing boom, teachers to fill the record number of vacancies in schools, and care workers to cope with the ageing population. Such measures could be very positive for the economy in the long term; whether they are affordable is another question.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: The SNP has entered a new, more serious era]
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