The phone call that tells you all you need to know about the benefits system

Blower cartoon
Blower cartoon

Why is Britain, alone in the developed world, seeing a surge in sickness benefit claims?

There are many theories and Alison McGovern, a welfare minister, offered a new one yesterday.

“Unfortunately, people have stolen from the state,” she said. “We’re bringing forward proposals to deal with that.” We’ll have to wait until next year to find out what her proposals are. The first crackdown, on unemployed young people, is relatively straightforward compared to the real crisis of incapacity benefit. On that, it seems, the Government still does not have much to say.

I’ve been making a Channel Four documentary about this called Britain’s Benefits Scandal. The scandal is how those on welfare are being failed by the state, not the other way around. It’s about how three million – soon to be four million – ended up trapped by a system that’s supposed to help them. The fraud that McGovern refers to does happen, but rarely. It’s true that people capable of work are being categorised as unfit, but it’s not their fault. It’s due to a system that is miscategorising people on an industrial scale, with calamitous effects.

Most assessments are now done remotely, via the discredited “Work Capability Assessment”. In the film, I ask an ex-DWP assessor how well he – or anyone else – could assess, via a phone call, if someone is too anxious or depressed to work.

Not very well, he replies, “Which is one of the things that, ethically and morally, I didn’t really feel comfortable with.” And yet this system is used to decide the fate of thousands of people every day, with an approval rate that has doubled to 80 per cent since 2010.

I noticed a theme among the claimants I met. Life had been going well for them, then a mental health episode knocked them for six. They needed temporary support, coaching, perhaps CBT or talking therapy. But instead they ended up signed off long-term sick – then abandoned. Erased not just from unemployment figures but from national debate, dropped in a Kafkaesque system that makes no sense to them (and not much more to those in charge).

Good luck to anyone trying to escape the system. In Manchester I met Michael who gets about £1,400 a month on benefits. “There’s people out there working and they’re not even earning that,” he says – but he still wants out and secured a place to train as a plasterer.

Our camera crew set out to meet him on day one of his course. He didn’t turn up. He says he was told by the JobCentre hotline that if he did try to learn a trade, his support would vanish. Panicked about how he’d support himself as he trained, he gave up.

Technically, he would not automatically lose his benefits: he’d just be at risk of a reassessment. But for many, this is enough: they have no trust in a system that they fear. Years of partial welfare reform has left an alphabet soup of benefits and protocols – ACA, UC, LCWRA, WCAs – which baffles experts, let alone claimants.

Claimants need proper support. Providing it may be expensive: but as Liz Kendall stated, the cost of not fixing the current system will be counted in tens of billions.

In Shoreham-by-Sea I met Gavin, a taxi driver who had told the DWP that he didn’t need sickness benefit any more. Not so fast, he was told: he had to wait to be “reassessed”.

When would that be? They didn’t say. That was the best part of three years ago, he tells me. “I’m probably working half the hours for the same money.”

So why speak out, I ask him. His reply sums up the whole situation. “I wanted to highlight how bad things are,” he says. “This is really important. When you need this help at your lowest ill health and when you’re at your worst, you can’t get it. And then when you don’t need it – or you feel much better – they won’t stop giving it to you.”

This is, to be sure, a criminal waste of money. But it’s hard to say that claimants are at fault. One of the DWP assessors told me what really breaks her heart is how so many young people are being shovelled on to the system. “I’m having to sign off people who have never had a job and barely leave the house,” she says. But the “assessment” is a tick-box exercise in which those doing the assessing are not able to exercise discretion.

All of these problems took root under the Tories, so Kendall and McGovern can hardly be blamed for what they inherited. But the idea of waiting a year to reform sickness benefit, when 3,000 a day are being added to it, also has its dangers.

Welfare reform is the toughest task in Westminster: politically, it’s all risk and no reward. But the daily damage now being inflicted on our economy and society is so great that delay is no longer an option. This can’t wait.


Britain’s Benefits Scandal: Dispatches will be broadcast on Channel 4 at 8pm on Monday December 2