Minister’s right to ask if feeling down justifies benefits
AHUNDRED years or so ago, there was a cartoonist named HM Bateman who specialised in depicting people rendering themselves pariahs by going against the conventions of polite society. His drawings, known as “The man who…” series, encompassed such gems as someone lighting his cigar before the royal toast and the man who stole the prize marrow at a village show.
Were he alive today, Bateman would surely be devoting a new cartoon to Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride – the man who blew the whistle on a mental health benefits racket that everyone in politics knew was happening, but nobody dared mention.
This week, Stride declared: “While I am grateful for today’s much more open approach to mental health, there is a danger that this has gone too far.
“There is a real risk now that we are labelling the normal ups and downs of human life as medical conditions which then actually serve to hold people back and, ultimately, to drive up the benefits bill.”
Having dipped a toe in these perilous waters, he then lived up to his name by really getting into his stride and adding: “If they go to the doctor and say ‘I’m feeling rather down and bluesy’, the doctor will give them on average about seven minutes and then, on 94 per cent of occasions, they will be signed off as not fit to carry out any work whatsoever.”
STRIDE’S boss Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stayed in the trenches rather than following his minister over the top. His official spokesman would not endorse the comments and said that the PM welcomed the fact that “as a society, we are more comfortable discussing mental health”.
And aren’t we just. From celebrities looking to excuse scandalous conduct to royal princes seeking to signal their virtue, it sometimes feels that we hear about little else.
Previous generations probably paid too little attention to their mental wellbeing – think, for instance, of all the men who came back from the Second World War undoubtedly suffering from post-traumatic stress and yet never spoke about their experiences at all.
But now the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that we do indeed risk convincing fundamentally well people they are suffering from debilitating illnesses. We all need to understand anxiety, stress and just feeling a bit low are inevitable parts of the human condition that must be endured and contained, rather than permitted to serve as passports to premium rate incapacity benefits, worth up to £400 a month more than standard outof-work payments. Stride is not spouting prejudice here – the figures back him up.
According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, the cost of sickness benefits will rise by nearly a third over the next few years, costing taxpayers an extra £25billion a year. Some 2.7 million people are on longterm sickness benefits now, compared with two million before the pandemic.
Mental health complaints are a major factor behind the trend. The Department of Work and Pensions’ own data shows that poor mental health is now the leading cause of disability among working-age adults. Two thirds of new incapacity benefit claimants are citing mental health problems and 20,000 people a month are being deemed incapable of work as a result – that’s a quarter of a million a year.
A DWP survey found 23 per cent of working-age adults now claim to have a disability, up from 16 per cent a decade ago. The change to our approach – rewarding over-sharing rather than stiff-upper-lip stoicism – is at the heart of it. Astonishingly, 5.4 million people now say their disability is linked to mental health issues, compared with 4.3 million in 2020-21.
OBVIOUSLY, some severe mental conditions, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, are genuinely debilitating and potentially a source of danger to others, therefore meriting intensive treatment.
But to exempt so many people from the social hub of the workplace long-term, leaving them more isolated and less employable, is the opposite of common sense. Instead of “being cruel to be kind”, the current approach amounts to being kind to be cruel: the wish to be seen as humane is creating a smaller economy, a higher benefits bill and more miserable and lonely people – a full house of negative outcomes.
If Stride is the man who highlighted these failings, let us not respond by clutching our pearls, feigning open-mouthed shock. Let us be the men and women who dared to support him.
‘5.4million say their disability is linked to mental health issues’