Depressed and anxious face losing sickness benefits

Millions of people on disability benefits face “the biggest welfare reforms in a generation” under which those with depression and anxiety could lose cash payments.

Sickness benefit payments should cease for “many, many people” with the conditions, ministers will argue, instead proposing “meaningful support” such as talking therapies and social care packages.

Mel Stride, the work and pensions secretary, said the welfare system should not be paying people to deal with the ordinary difficulties of life. He is preparing to publish plans that would overhaul benefits paid to millions of people and are likely to stop regular payments for a variety of mental health problems and other conditions.

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Welfare reform will be used as a key dividing line in the general election expected this year, as Stride said that it was “extraordinary” that Labour was refusing to say whether it supported his benefits changes and argued that many voters “deep down” agreed with him.

Rishi Sunak is entering one of the most difficult weeks of his premiership, with Tory rebels plotting to oust him in the wake of the local elections on Thursday. In an attempt to shore up his position the prime minister has announced a series of major policies, including on welfare, the Rwanda deportation plan and a pledge to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030.

Calling for a “Beveridge reset moment” of welfare, Stride said that the over-labelling of everyday worries as mental health problems was “definitely a factor” in the increase in economic inactivity due to long-term sickness to a record 2.8 million people. He said taxpayers would not accept the “huge amounts of money” needed to pay for a projected two million rise in the numbers receiving sickness benefits before the end of the decade.

“There are those that have perhaps milder mental health conditions, or where perhaps there has been too great a move towards labelling certain behaviours as having certain [medical] conditions attached to them, where actually work is the answer or part of the answer,” Stride said in an interview with The Times.

“What we’ve got to avoid is being in a situation where for those people we too readily say, ‘well, actually, we need you to be on benefits’.”

Earlier in April Sunak said he was on a “moral mission” to reform welfare as he warned that too many people were being “parked” on benefits, leading to “unsustainable” rises in cost, with the £50 billion bill for working-age sickness benefits due to rise by another £20 billion before the end of the decade.

On Monday Stride will publish a green paper on reform centring on the main disability benefit, personal independence payments, which are paid to 3.5 million people to compensate for the costs of ill health, irrespective of whether they can work.

He said he had “concerns about how well targeted PIP is” and that people did not necessarily need “an ongoing series of payments of thousands of pounds a year” for their conditions. Some with mobility problems might only need “some small number of relatively inexpensive adaptations — a grab rail to get into the bath and other things of that made”, Stride suggested.

The biggest change being proposed is for those with mental health difficulties. Stride said it could be that “where you have mild depression or anxiety, that the best thing to do is not so much a cash transfer, but actually some kind of meaningful support that helps get that person into a position where they’re having a much better life, where work is at the centre of their life,” he said.

He suggested that talking therapies, social care packages, respite care and a “whole plethora of things” could be alternatives to cash. The system should not “just restrict [benefits] to this narrow idea of sending a benefit payment to somebody”, he said.

Stride said it was an “open question” as to whether people with conditions such as ADHD or learning disabilities should also be receiving cash disability benefits given “they come in all sorts of different forms of scales of severity”.

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Stride stressed he did not have a “preconceived opinion” about the right solution but insisted there were “fundamental questions to answer” about how the system worked.

Critics have questioned where this support will come from at a time when there are 1.9 million on NHS mental health waiting lists, but Stride promised that offering more help was a “key area of focus for the government”, pointing to recent announcements of 400,000 more talking therapies.

There are 360,000 people claiming PIP for anxiety and depression, double the figure five years ago and three times as many as for all cancers combined. Stride said “the growth in milder mental health conditions and that leading to people not working is an issue” for the welfare system, which had to get better at “appropriately differentiating” those conditions where people could not be expected to get a job from those compatible with work.

As part of efforts to make the system “better targeted”, he said there were degenerative or permanent conditions ranging from Parkinson’s to Downs syndrome where “it’s absolutely clear that PIP should be provided” and claims needed to be made easier. “There are perhaps some people that need more support than the current system is giving them. But equally there are many, many people for whom support could potentially come in a different form.”

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Stride insisted that the “fundamental impetus” for the changes was helping people better and ensuring they were in work, rather than cost cutting. He acknowledged, however, that the cost “has to be one of the considerations that is borne in mind” because of the predicted future increase in spending. “It’s difficult to describe as sustainable when we’re looking at a 63 per cent increase in PIP spend, about £13 billion over the next few years. These are huge amounts of money.”