Thousands of people claiming sickness benefits face being forced to take up part-time work, the pensions secretary will indicate today as he opens a new front in the battle over welfare reform.
The controversial step is needed to tackle a “sickness benefit culture” trapping about 2.5 million people in unemployment, Iain Duncan Smith will suggest. The current assessment of those claiming sickness benefits contains a “fundamental flaw”, he believes, because it incentivises people to say that they cannot carry out any work rather than helping them to identify which jobs they could take.
He says a shake-up is needed of the “work capability assessment”, which is used to judge claims for Employment Support Allowance (ESA). Aides said that it would allow for a “more flexible, targeted and personalised approach”.
Mr Duncan Smith will also call for employers to do more to keep in touch with workers who sign off sick and for doctors to take more account of the health benefits of employment, as he takes aim at what he says is a “sickness benefit culture” that is in “dire need of reform”.
About two million people in Britain receive ESA, which is normally just over £100 a week — an amount that has more than trebled in four years. Benefits, including pensions and tax credits, are forecast to cost the government £217 billion this year, or 29 per cent of total public spending.
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Labour, which has been sharply critical of cuts to sickness benefits in last month’s budget, is likely to oppose moves to require ill people to take jobs. Aides said that Mr Duncan Smith was prepared to take on critics, however, because he believed that the system was writing off too many claimants who could be helped back into work.
“Under the existing system, there is a limited opportunity to work with the Jobcentre,” he will say. “Instead, they receive an assessment of their condition that focuses on what they can’t do rather than on what they can do. That assessment will force them into a binary category saying they can be expected to work or they can’t.
“We need a system focused on what a claimant can do and the support they’ll need — and not just on what they can’t do.”
Increasing the conditions set on people receiving sick benefit will provoke opposition. Campaigners are critical of rules that force some claimants to carry out “work-related activity”, such as completing CVs and attending confidence-building sessions. About a quarter of those claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance suffer from common mental health conditions.
The mental health charity Mind said last year that in a survey of claimants with mental health conditions, more than four in five reported that their experience of back-to-work programmes had made their mental health worse or much worse. Some 83 per cent said their self-esteem had got worse or much worse and 82 per cent said the schemes had lowered their confidence.
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Allies of the welfare secretary said that ministers wanted to work with mental health charities to ensure that the new test captured what claimants could do and that any support was tailored to their needs. Mr Duncan Smith will also emphasise that worklessness can worsen mental health — even if the reason for ill health is a physical one.
He will urge Labour not to block the reform. “Given comments from each of the leadership candidates about the Welfare and Reform Bill, I suspect they will continue on this path of blind blanket opposition,” he will tell charities and think tanks in London. “The challenge to Labour is to see that the reforms I am proposing are about transforming lives.”
Mr Duncan Smith will also repeat a target of getting one million more disabled people into work over the course of the current parliament.