Prime minister Rishi Sunak has announced a crackdown on sickness and disability benefits in order to end a “sicknote culture” and “over-medicalising the everyday challenges and worries of life”, in part because he claims that “good work” can actually improve mental and physical health. He instead wants to focus on “what people can do with the right support in place, rather than what they can’t do”.

Taxpayers and recipients of sickness and disability benefits might feel like they’ve heard all this before. Back in 2015 then-work and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith promised to “end sicknote culture” by supporting “a system focused on what a claimant can do … and not just on what they can’t”.

And there are echoes too of 2007 when then-work and pensions secretary Peter Hain promised to end “sicknote culture” to focus on what people “can do rather than what they cannot do”, in part because of a belief that being in work “is usually good for people with all types of mental health problems”.

Given their unquestioning belief in the efficacy of such measures, it must be confounding for politicians to learn that the numbers of disabled people and people claiming disability benefits continues to rise.

In the last ten years, the percentage of working-age adults who are disabled has increased from 16% to 23%, while among children it has gone from 7% to 11%. Interestingly, for people of state-pension age, the figure has remained relatively stable (43% to 45%).

In April, the Institute for Fiscal Studies........

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