One of the main figures used in the film is the forecast for sickness benefit caseloads: from 3.2m in the last financial year to 3.8m in 2028/29. It's perhaps one of the most shocking figures in UK public life: that's the equivalent of losing a city the size of Glasgow from the UK economy.
For almost 20 years, UK had been making real and sustained progress in reducing the sickness benefit numbers. Workplaces became a lot friendlier to people with disabilities and flexible working seemed to serve to accommodate in the economy those who had been previously excluded. But that reversed suddenly: not during Covid but in 2018/19. The DWP projections for the next five years are, alas, entirely consistent with the trend of the last five.
The figure is published by the DWP in a technical note (latest here) about projected benefit caseloads. It uses OBR forecasts, which ministers cannot influence (to their chagrin). If ministers promise reform in a Budget, the OBR verdict comes weeks later when this DWP caseload projection is updated in a spreadsheet.
There are many versions of the figure we could have gone with: if you add the number on sickness benefits who are in work you add another 700,000. But the film is about worklessness, so the figures do not include the rise of sickness benefit given to people in-work, children or pensioners. If you include all such benefits given to all ages the cost is forecast to rise to £108 billion by 2028/29, vs £78bn last year (figures here). But the film only refers to figures for out-of-work benefits claimed by people of working age.
The above chart is our lead metric: we took our lead from the Office for Budget Responsibility which uses this figure for its Oct24 Welfare Trends report. This is shown below (expressing it in terms of population share: from today's 7 per cent to an all-time high of 8 per cent).
Approvals are not slowing and rose above 3,000 a day in March, the latest month for which full figures are available (and the highest since lockdown). The figure is derived by dividing the Work Capability Assessment monthly totals by the number of working days in the month (figures here).
The caseload is also driven up by a fall in those coming off sickness benefits. There are supposed to be reassessments, moving people back to work. But in a startling disclosure, the OBR's Oct24 Welfare Trends report found that the number of sickness benefits claimants moving from welfare to work due to a reassessment has fallen from a peak of 204,000 a year to about 2,800 a year (below).
The OBR found (p8, pdf) that the biggest factor driving the increase in sickness benefit was not an increase in sign-ons but the reduction in drop-off rate during the application process. So often, tiny tweaks to the process (making it less onerous) can have a profound effect on outcomes, as other studies have shown.
A rise in number of applications counts for an extra 72,000 a year, says the OBR. The rise in the percentage approved adds a further 70,000. But it found that the biggest single factor was a greater share of those who start applications following it through, rather than dropping out. This led to 129,000 more a year.
The OBR said this could reflect
worsening health conditions of applicants
changes to the length of time an assessment takes
rules changes under UC relative to ESA that allow claimants to do some work during the assessment phase without having to terminate claims
changes to the processes for verifying and handling fit notes following Covid.
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