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Welfare Reform and Incapacity Benefit

Just over 7.8 million of our fellow citizens are outside the labour market when they could be in it, according to the Office for National Statistics. That demonstrates that welfare under Labour is not working as well as it could. Eight years of Labour have given us chaos, complacency and false starts. Since 1997, the Department for Work and Pensions has had six Secretaries of State and we have had 28 White or Green papers. Nowhere is the Government’s shambolic performance on welfare better demonstrated than in incapacity benefits. There are now 2.74 million people of working age on those benefits, 116,000 more than when Labour came to power. The Government messed up reform long before their current attempts. They reduced the value of incapacity benefit to new claimants by clumsy means-testing changes in 2001, which merely deterred existing claimants from returning to work because they feared that if they ever had to go back on to benefit they would have to do so at a much lower rate. Another change that year tightened up the IB eligibility criteria by demanding a much tougher national insurance contribution record. What was the result? A perverse effect. Certainly, people came off pure IB, but they then claimed income support with a disability premium, shoving up those numbers.