When I last interviewed Nigel Farage, he told me a new divide was opening in Britain. The country was being cleft in two: workers on one side, workless on the other. He was in no doubt whose team his insurgent party was on. Robert Jenrick’s welfare reforms are the fullest expression yet of that argument. Reform has today promised to cut a whopping £50 billion from the benefits bill – a little under half of all working-age welfare spending.Whilst the plausibility of this scale of saving may be debatable, the diagnosis is hard to dispute. In the past two decades, Britain has created a workfree lifestyle which barely existed before. We have contrived to build a system in which incapacity is treated as a permanent status rather than a condition to be overcome; in which the state asks what someone can’t do long before identifying what they can; and in which the financial incentives often favour remaining sick over getting better.It’s difficult to argue against this when you look at the numbers. Pre-Covid, around 13,000 initial awards were made on new PIP claims each month; now it’s roughly 34,000. Psychiatric disorders have become the largest disabling-condition category among PIP claimants. The explosion in sickness and disability benefits has been disproportionately driven by mental health and behavioural conditions which, until a few years ago, few seriously believed should preclude work. To proceed from a diagnosis of ADHD to an assumption that someone can’t get some sort of employment, for instance, surely stretches credulity. 

Whilst the plan as a whole........

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