Sick-note culture: Sunak sounds the alarm

Once, Britain was known as the “sick man of Europe” because of its failing economy, said the Daily Mail. These days, with 2.8 million people of working age on long-term benefits for reasons of ill-health or disability, and 11 million sick notes issued last year, that title can be taken more literally. As Rishi Sunak noted in a speech last week, there is a moral and economic imperative to address this. Work can be a source of purpose and pride; the Treasury needs the tax receipts workers provide; and the benefits bill is a massive drain. Last year, disability benefits for working-age people cost £69bn in total – more than the UK’s schools budget. To keep more people in work, Sunak wants to remove the right to issue sick notes from doctors (who, he says, find it hard to say no to their patients), and hand it to specialists linked to the benefits system who will have more time to consider a person’s fitness. And he wants to redesign Personal Independence Payments (Pip), the main disability benefit. He notes that half of claimants now cite mental health problems; and a growing proportion of them are under 25 – which, he says, suggests that we are “over-medicalising” everyday challenges.

Here we go, said Frances Ryan in The Guardian. Time and again, when the Tories are in trouble, they sound the alarm about skivers, the workshy – or “sick-note culture”. Sunak’s plan for sick notes is a “classic piece of Conservative welfare thinking”. If too many workers are falling sick, and claiming sick pay, don’t address the cause, just get someone who is not a doctor to declare that they’re not sick after all. As for his plan to reform Pip, by giving claimants with mental health issues therapy instead of cash, how will that work? One reason so many are off work is that 1.9 million people in England are waiting for mental health services. Britain does not have a “sick-note culture”. What it has is record NHS waiting lists, substandard housing, low-paid insecure jobs and poor long-Covid support.

Talk of cutting benefits to the vulnerable will always cause outrage, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. And Sunak’s plan is flawed. For instance, experience tells us that bringing in third parties to assess people’s health can lead to “terrible injustices”; and even if he is right that mental illness is being over-diagnosed, cutting Pip risks causing hardship if long-term illness is only rising because the nation is getting sicker. On the other hand, the bill for Pip is vast, and is forecast to increase 50% in four years; and the UK’s economic growth depends on getting people back to work to fill post-Brexit labour shortages. Labour is also worrying about all this, so one way or another, social security reforms are coming, “and, sadly, there will be losers”.