It was in the cafe of a leisure centre in Barking, east London, last month that the Work and Pensions Secretary attempted to shatter the big taboo about Britain’s worklessness crisis.
Sitting at a table overlooking a windswept park, Mel Stride told The Telegraph that mental health culture had “gone too far”.
The intervention was a calculated risk from a level-headed politician aware it would spark controversy. But he wanted to try and shift the conversation about how to tackle the spiralling number of people – especially the young – being signed off as long-term sick.
Statistics released earlier this week show Mr Stride was right to feel a growing sense of alarm over the rising tide of worklessness in Britain.
The number of Britons classed as “economically inactive”, meaning they are neither in a job nor looking for one, has ballooned to 9.25 million post-pandemic.
Most of that increase can be attributed to a huge spike in long-term sickness, which has added 717,000 people to the benefits bill since the start of 2020.
Even more worrying is the fact that young people are driving the trend, with people in their early 20s now more likely to be signed off than 40-year-olds.
As a result, there are now 2.8 million on the long-term sick list – exactly double the number of unemployed Britons who are looking for a job.
Of those who have been signed off ill, just over half – some 53 per cent – reported depression, bad nerves or anxiety as the reasons they were unable to work.
The evidence increasingly shows that, once people are handed a sick note by a doctor, the prospects of getting them back into employment are slim.
Data published by the NHS this month revealed that 11 million “fit notes” were issued last year, of which 94 per cent declared the recipient not fit for any work at all.
Most were handed to people already on the long-term sick list and simply rolled over their status, often without any assessment of their condition.
Health service figures also show that, over the past few years, doctors have begun signing off “fit notes” for mental health problems covering longer periods.
In 2019-20, the year before the pandemic, 43.5 per cent of mental health notes were issued for a period of longer than five weeks, but by 2022-23 the proportion was 62 per cent.
At the same time, the percentage of notes granted that covered more than 20 weeks – the longest period available – also rose slightly, from 11 per cent to 13 per cent.
All of this has had a damaging impact on both Britain’s economic competitiveness and the taxpayers’ pocket as benefits payments balloon.
Pre-pandemic, the UK boasted the second best record on worklessness in the G7, with a lower level than France, Germany, Italy, the US and Canada.
But while the labour markets in those countries have all recovered from the blow of Covid, three years on from the end of lockdowns Britain’s has not.
The UK is now the only member of the world’s wealthiest club of nations to still have higher levels of economic inactivity now than before the pandemic.
At the same time, with government budgets tighter than in years, the sickness benefits bill has spiralled by almost two-thirds, from £42.3 billion to £69 billion.
The post-pandemic spike means the Exchequer is now spending more cash on welfare payments to the long-term ill than it does on schools or policing.
In a damning analysis this week, the Work Foundation called the UK an “international outlier” in its failure to tackle worklessness.
“Compared to other European nations, where the post-pandemic rises in inactivity have returned to normal, the UK’s rate remains stubbornly high – and this month’s data shows that the tide isn’t turning,” it warned.
Until Mr Stride’s intervention, politicians had been happy to talk about the scale of the problem and the measures they were taking to address it.
But few had been prepared to ask searching questions about the root cause for fear of breaking social taboos around discussing mental health.
The Work and Pensions Secretary was careful to stress that much of the modern approach to being more open about mental health was a positive development.
At the same time, however, he cautioned that there was “a real risk now that we are labelling the normal ups and downs of human life as medical conditions”.
He also expressed concerns that GPs, many of whom are under the cosh and have little mental health expertise, were too quick to sign many people off.
Rishi Sunak, whose spokesman was initially reluctant to row in behind those remarks, has now swung behind Mr Stride’s view.
“We don’t just need to change the sick note, we need to change the sick note culture so the default becomes what work you can do – not what you can’t,” the Prime Minister will say in a speech on Friday.
“We need to be more ambitious about helping people back to work and more honest about the risk of over-medicalising the everyday challenges and worries of life.”
Mr Sunak will unveil plans to tighten up the “fit note” system, including ending the situation in which people languish on the sickness list without being regularly assessed.
At the same time, he will highlight the extra money the Government has put into funding hundreds of thousands more talking therapy sessions on the NHS.
He will hope that the new measures prove enough to turn the tide on a worklessness crisis that neither he politically, nor Britain economically, can afford any longer.
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