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Good afternoon and welcome to this week’s The State We’re In. Let’s look at the benefits system and, specifically, how it treats people with mental health conditions who need support.
If you’re reading coverage of the debate about welfare reform and, in particular, the convergence of three major reviews on the subject and wondering how it all fits together, this newsletter is for you.
Coming up in this week’s newsletter:
Why the government may end up giving people with mental health conditions more support as part of welfare reforms… Former Tory Work and Pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith tells me he has unfinished business when it comes to the benefits system. And, why, finally, Britain’s housing market is in big trouble…I will attempt to explain how multiple things can be true at once: yes, there has been an uptick in the number of people, particularly younger adults, with mental health conditions, and some of them are economically inactive. But this is not necessarily through choice or desire, as is so often suggested in stigmatising coverage of their situation.
Instead, they are often encouraged into economic inactivity through our benefits system which, as Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden often puts it, regularly signs people off and writes them off.
According to the latest Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) data, one in five working-age adults (20.3 per cent) are now claiming Universal Credit, totalling roughly 7.3 million people.
Among these claimants are a higher number of younger people, with 3.3 million individuals under the age of 40 now receiving Universal Credit.
Exclusive analysis of national data for this newsletter by the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute (the charity founded and chaired by Martin Lewis), finds that two out of five adults in England who are unemployed or economically inactive have a common mental health condition such as depression or anxiety.
If reflected across the UK, that would amount to 4.2 million people in total.
As things stand, however, the benefits system often not only encourages these people into economic inactivity, but, worse, can make it difficult for them to re-enter work.
Consider Emma. She is now in her early 30s and living in Newcastle.
In 2017, Emma was working at a very high level as an intensive care nurse. Her mental health had been faltering for years and, eventually, it became severe, and she quit her job. Then followed a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and OCD. She was just 25 at the time.
“I’d been struggling for a while, but there was so much stigma that I didn’t speak out,” Emma says. “I was so worried, I didn’t want people to judge.”
The issues arose when Emma encountered the benefits system.
“An occupational therapist from the mental health crisis team encouraged me to apply for Universal Credit,” Emma explains. “It was such a challenging time because I had gone from working in the public sector to feeling like I was just a drain on society and the state’s resources.”
Emma was initially allocated to a work group but “quickly dismissed” and signed off because she was “deemed to be too unwell”.
“I also didn’t know that I had somehow been classed as having a disability until I got a benefits letter through. I found that really difficult to process – going from a care provider and then being told that I had a disability via a financial letter. I didn’t accept that.”
Emma was paid around £500 a month in Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and Employment Support Allowance (ESA).
When she restarted work on a self-employed basis, she told the Mental Health Community Service (who was supporting her with her recovery) that they said they could no longer support her and signed her off from that because she was now “too well” for that support.
However, now working in Ovarian Cancer research and shared decision-making, Emma sees work as a “key part” of her recovery.
“It gives me purpose,” she says. “I never had any further contact from the DWP work group, and I felt like I had just been labelled as someone who couldn’t work.”
Now able to reflect on her situation, Emma wishes she had been contacted more, but in a “sensitive way”.
“I really did need time off,” she says. “I was very unwell. But nobody picked up with me to see how I was doing or whether I was ready to try to work.”
Emma feels she was just “written off” and hopes that any welfare reforms find a compassionate way to support people into work.
Under the guidance of Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden, disabilities minister Sir Stephen Timms, youth unemployment chief Alan Milburn and clinical psychologist Peter Fonagy, Labour wants to fix this.
Pat McFadden has told me that the benefits system “writes people off” as a “feature, not a bug” of the system.
So, what to do? Three major and interconnected reviews are currently under way from Timms, Milburn and Fonagy, respectively. All of them look at welfare, economic inactivity, disability benefits, and the rising demand for mental health support.
Fonagy is specifically investigating why there has been a surge in demand for mental health support in England, zeroing in on whether support gaps drive diagnostic inflation.
Earlier this week, the clinician came out and said that young people are “not snowflakes” and warned that the mental “distress” they are experiencing is very real.
Milburn, with whom I travelled to the Netherlands to look at the European country’s support for younger people, is looking specifically at the plight of NEETs – young people who are not in Education, Employment or Training.
As he told me during that trip, he is increasingly firm in the view that work is part of the answer to the anxiety and isolation many young people feel. But, equally, that more money will need to be spent on support.
And, finally, Timms is looking at how to reform Personal Independence Payments (PIP – formerly the benefit known as DLA, which Emma received). In particular, he is looking at what support will be best for people experiencing mental health problems.
Fix the system Labour must. The wellbeing and life chances of millions of people, like Emma, now depend upon them being able to do so.
I have now travelled across Britain and Europe looking at our benefits system, and how it compares to the Netherlands, where youth unemployment is less than half Britain’s.
What is going wrong? It is, undeniably, a lack of person-centred and specific support which helps, rather than forces, people back into the workplace if that is something they are up to doing.
Some progress has been made. I’ve sat with specialist youth work coaches and employers who are giving 18- 24-year-olds opportunities under the government’s Jobs Guarantee scheme. But for those slightly older, Emma’s generation, the scars of being “written off” and made to feel like a “burden”, as she put it, will take time to heal.
For their part, the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute are calling for more support.
Commenting on the research, Conor D’Arcy, the organisation’s deputy chief executive, said the government had a “once in a generation opportunity” to change things.
They hope that change will look like “prioritising tailored employment support to get people into the right role and showing employers what good workplace support looks like. Addressing what people actually say would help them find and stay in jobs, rather than increasing conditionality and benefits sanctions, is the best way to get Britain working.”
Long term, such measures could certainly reduce Britain’s benefits bill. However, if Burnham was hoping that any of his three major reviews would yield savings ahead of what is going to be a very tricky Autumn Budget, he may, as Milburn alluded to me in the Netherlands, find that he has to spend money to save money when it comes to the rising number of people who need state support because of a mental health problem.
A spokesperson for the DWP said: “We recognise the challenges that mental health conditions can present, which is why we are committed to providing tailored support that helps people move towards their goals.”
“We also know that mental health can fluctuate, and we continue to work to improve the support available through initiatives such as Access to Work, so that more people get the right help at the right time.”
“Our £2.5 billion investment in youth employment will create nearly one million jobs and training opportunities, and further reform will follow the Milburn Review this autumn.”
You can read my full interview with Alan Milburn in the Netherlands here.
Housing crisis watch
This week I’d like to draw your attention to two exclusive stories that I have published.
The first reveals that Britain’s economic watchdog, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), may revise down the growth estimates it had attached to Labour’s landmark planning reforms.
The second digs into how serious the “long and slow crash” of our housing market is and what, besides bringing back the Tories’ Help to Buy policy, this government might do about it.
What I’ve been watching…
I finally made it to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey at the IMAX cinema inside the Science Museum at the weekend. I was worried that the film would drag but, if anything, it went by very quickly. I’ll suspend my disbelief for a moment and forgive Nolan for omitting Odysseus’s affair with the witch Circe and say that it was a brilliant, epic retelling of Homer’s poem. As allegories go, there is a message here for all of us about hubris and what happens when we put our own desires and wants above those of our community.
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