Time to get tougher

ON the face of it, the UK’s headline unemployment figure of 1.3million, published yesterday, makes encouraging reading.

True, Scotland may have witnessed a drop in the number of women in work, but the employment figures here and across the UK remain buoyant.

Just 3.9 per cent of Britain’s working-age population are looking for work and have been unable to find it.

This compares with 6 per cent in the EU and 7 per cent in France. In the smaller print below the headline, however, lurks a much more ominous story.

A staggering 2.55million people between the ages of 16 and 64 are long-term sick and apparently unable to work at all. This is 400,000 more than before the pandemic and appears still to be rising. So why?

The parlous state of the NHS is likely to have had an effect, while the impact of furlough and lockdown on the nation’s energy levels surely plays a part.

Whatever the reasons, it is a massive drain on the nation’s resources, with fewer workers paying higher taxes to support ever-rising numbers of those claiming sickness benefits.

Should sickness levels continue ticking up, we are in danger of slipping back into the ‘cycle of dependency’ that Iain Duncan Smith worked so hard to break more than a decade ago.

What he recognised was that worklessness could be contagious and pass through generations. His solution? Make work pay.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt seems to have recognised this with his new carrot-andstick approach to coax the long-term ill into jobs. Yesterday’s numbers suggest that he might use a little less carrot and a little more stick. Because at the moment, Britain isn’t working.