Charities slam Tony Blair think tank report on disability benefits

A new report has told the government that people diagnosed with moderate depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and back pain should not be eligible for cash benefits, prompting an angry response from the disability aid sector.

Research from the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) argues that such conditions should be classed as “non-work limiting”, meaning that the default assumption is that they should not prevent an individual from working.

This could be an “emergency handbrake” on welfare spending, saving £11.5bn by 2029, the group said. The researchers also called on ministers to use secondary legislation to implement changes; This means MPs will face seriously reduced oversight.

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said it would “consider” the TBI report, but disability learning charity Mencap said its recommendations were “deeply unhelpful and misinformed”.

Jon Sparkes, the charity’s chief executive, said the research “ignores the lived reality of people with learning disabilities and plays into a populist trope about welfare”.

“Our evidence is clear: people with learning disabilities want to work,” he said: “What they lack is consistency, expert support and employers willing and equipped to give them a fair chance.

“Labeling people and depriving them of social rights will not eliminate the root cause. It will push people deeper into anxiety, misery and poverty. This is not a reform, but a recipe for making things worse.”

“Britain is not the only country experiencing deterioration in mental health since the pandemic,” the TBI report says, but adds that the number of people moving onto long-term benefits as a result is more country-specific.

The think tank, founded by former Labor prime minister Tony Blair, states that 2.8 million people, including 185,000 young people (aged 18-24), are unemployed due to health problems. This figure has almost doubled from 94,000 in 2012.

The increase has raised concerns about the UK’s welfare spending; The DWP is forecast to spend £77.1bn on health and disability benefits this financial year, compared to £49.1bn before the pandemic (2019). This compares with the £146.1 billion the department will spend on state pensions this year.

The government is currently conducting a review of the Personal Independence Payment (Pip), the UK’s most claimed health and disability benefit, with the aim of making it “fit and fair for the future”.

The payment was at the heart of Labor’s plans to cut welfare spending last year; Proposals to change the assessment criteria to make it effectively harder to claim have been met with fierce opposition from campaign groups and politicians.

Ministers backed down on the plans in late June after more than 100 Labor MPs threatened to vote against the government on the measures. The concession and review were announced by disability minister Sir Stephen Timms amid debate over the legislation.

Charles Gillies, policy co-chair of the Disability Benefits Consortium and senior policy officer at the MS Society, said: “We are genuinely concerned that the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) is trying to push harmful benefit cuts onto the government agenda, something the Prime Minister was forced to back down from less than a year ago.

“We call on the government to remember that disabled people, campaigners and MPs did not oppose such harmful cuts last time and reject these proposals.”

Tom Pollard, head of policy, campaigns and public relations at mental health charity Mind, commented that the proposals were “a discriminatory and simplistic response to a hugely complex challenge”, noting that eligibility for health and disability benefits is already based on functional assessments of how a claimant’s condition affects their ability to work.

Responding to criticism, TBI Senior Policy and Policy Director Ryan Wain said: “Up to 1,000 people a day enter a system that offers no treatment, no route back to work and no plan for most. We are proposing a handbrake to fix this in the short term while the government rightly builds on longer-term, wholesale reform of this broken system.”

“Approximately one-third of PIP assessments are completed without any external clinical evidence. 93 percent of eligible grades say ‘unfit for work’ without any adjustments. Less than 1 in 100 applicants to UC Health get a job each month. A system with these numbers loses public trust, and when that trust is lost, people with the most severe conditions pay the price.”

“In this way, you are dragged into a culture war about the existence of mental health problems. Our proposal is not an example of this, but an antidote to it.”

“The government is rightly dedicating resources and political capital to long-term, core welfare system reform. We support it. But every day the system is failing people and public trust is being eroded.”

A DWP spokesman said: “We agree that the system we inherited has left too many people disabled without treatment or job-related help. This is a failure that the government is determined to fix through reforms that put opportunity at their core.”

“We are already taking action: rebalancing Universal Credit, saving nearly £1bn; increasing face-to-face assessments and improving the use of NHS evidence, all while ensuring those truly unable to work are always protected. We will take the TBI’s report into account.”