Spending limits

Areckoning with the consequences of lockdown is becoming more pressing because, with every passing month, Britain’s worklessness crisis is getting worse. The Office for Budget Responsibility today indicates that annual spending on health and disability benefits will jump by more than a third over the next half decade. More than nine million people of working age are economically inactive, while over 2.7 million say that long-term sickness is keeping them out of the jobs market.

Though our welfare system may soon be overwhelmed, however, there are always more demands on it. Yesterday, the findings of a five-year Ombudsman investigation into the women affected by the state pension age rise concluded that they must be compensated after government failings. Where will the money come from? The decision to increase the pension age from 60 marked one of the largest single government savings of all time. It may not have been popular, but it was a coherent response to the challenge posed by rising longevity and spiralling costs.

Elsewhere, spending on welfare appears to be out of control, exceeding £130billion every year. The Work and Pensions Secretary has this week warned of the risks of conflating mental ill-health with “normal anxieties of life”; with more than 900,000 job vacancies, the system must be able to distinguish between those who might gain from a return to work and those who require medical help.

Thus far, however, comprehensive action to achieve this has not been forthcoming. There needs to be a much more fundamental reform of welfare to restore fairness and reduce costs. Hard choices cannot be one-offs.