Starmer ‘not doing enough to end tsunami of sick notes’ pushing up benefits claimants

Iain Duncan Smith has said far more needs to be done to prevent young people leaving school and going ‘straight to their sick beds’

Labour’s plans to cut the welfare bill do not go nearly far enough, the former minister who brought in the biggest reform of benefits since the 1940s has warned.

In a week where Sir Keir Starmer’s government announced plans to remove disability benefits from an estimated 1 million claimants, former Tory work and pensions secretary Sir Iain Duncan Smith said more must be done to stop “a tsunami of so-called fit notes signing people off work forever”.

Writing exclusively for The Independent, Sir Iain also raised problems with a culture where young people leave school “and go straight to their sick beds”.

Conservative former leader Iain Duncan Smith (PA Wire)

Sir Iain warned: “We must end the tsunami of so-called fit notes that sign people off work forever, instead encouraging GPs to use the ‘maybe fit for work option’. And we need to enlist employers and schools if we are to halt the number of young people moving directly from education to their sick beds.”

He pointed out that in “an increasingly dangerous world” where the UK is under pressure to invest more in defence, the burgeoning welfare bill is now unsustainable.

He said: “When I resigned as the secretary of state for work and pensions [in 2016] from David Cameron’s government, welfare stood at £61.6bn. Yet by the end of this parliament, it is projected to be £108.7bn. Sickness benefit alone which was £19bn in 2016 is set to rise to £32bn. So it is with disability benefit, set to rise from £11bn to some £31bn.”

With the fifth anniversary of the start of the Covid lockdown coming up this weekend, Sir Iain partially blamed the pandemic response for the ballooning of the welfare budget.

“The rise in sickness benefit claims poses a challenge to the government, particularly because some 60 per cent of claims since Covid are from mental health issues. The majority of these are for depression and anxiety. The health department has declared that the best treatment for depression and anxiety is going back to work. That is why, as sickness benefit moves into universal credit, the possibility of large-scale reform opens up for the government.”

But while the current Labour work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall tackled disability benefit by raising the threshold at which people can claim it, she did little to tackle the rise in sickness benefit claims.

Sir Iain complained that when the minister spoke to the Commons he “could see big reform was not there, instead they narrowly changed a few things just to obtain a saving of £5bn. This money seems to be set to help the chancellor out of the bind of breaking her own fiscal rule as she goes to the spring statement, not to reform the system”.

Sir Iain’s think tank, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), which shaped the reforms in the Cameron government to “make work pay”, has recently published its How to Get Britain Working report with a 16-step action plan to reverse economic inactivity and generate as much as £13bn for the public purse.

Liz Kendall’s reforms do not go far enough to tackle Britain’s sick note culture, Duncan Smith said (Getty)

Research by the CSJ revealed that more than 80 per cent of GPs agree that society’s approach to mental health has led to the normal ups and downs of life being seen as medical problems, too often prescribing when non-pharmaceutical interventions would be more suitable, medicalising things they would prefer not to.

Sir Iain called for reform of the judge-led tribunal system and the finding answers to “the underlying questions of how we function as a society, which leave too many without aspiration or hope”.

He noted that the CSJ’s recent Lost Boys report, led by former Tory MP Miriam Cates, highlighted the number of young men who are not in education, employment or training (Neet) has increased since the pandemic by a staggering 40 per cent.

But he added that the recent hike in national insurance contributions for employers in last autumn’s Budget has made things very difficult for the current work and pensions secretary.

He said: “I have some sympathy for Liz Kendall as just when she sets out to get people back into the work, the chancellor’s damaging rise in national insurance just made that route out of benefits a lot tougher.”