New dogs who can
The Tories are replacing workless and mentally ill citizens with low-skilled immigrants
Between 2010 and 2015 all of British politics was essentially about two topics: welfare and immigration. Cameron and Osborne hoped to slash the budget deficit in part by reducing the number of people on out of work benefits and disability benefit. They rolled out the outgoing Labour government’s standardised disability assessments more widely, they introduced Universal Credit to replace most working-age benefits, and introduced the Personal Independence Payment to replace Disability Living Allowance. A fat George Osborne would make speeches about jobless scroungers snoozing all day then chuckle as he was booed at the Paralympic games. Every week Labour would accuse the heartless Tories of murdering the disabled, Ed Miliband would say something about the Bedroom Tax and Benefit Sanctions and Zero-Hours-Contracts. At the same time Nigel Farage appeared on TV every night to argue that being inside the European Union meant uncontrolled immigration of hard-working Polish plumbers, which was intolerable. Cameron and Osborne understood that they could safely ignore the wailing from the left because the public at large had very limited sympathy for working-age welfare claimants. They eventually relented to UKIP’s demand for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union and won a small majority in 2015 against all expectations.
Eight years on Conservative voters ostensibly got what they voted for. Outside the EU Britain can set its own immigration policy, Universal Credit (with its focus on work and conditionality) has subsumed almost all working-age-benefits, and everyone who makes a new claim for PIP must undergo a face-to-face standardised assessment. If you look a little closer, however, you’ll find things have gone badly wrong. Somehow our welfare bill and claimant count has significantly increased despite a hot labour market with over a million vacancies. Net migration numbers have skyrocketed to half a million in 2022, with projections of up to one million in 2023. In TV debates in 2010 David Cameron promised to reduce annual immigration to the “tens of thousands”, under Rishi it looks set to increase to the “thousands of thousands”.
Let’s look a bit closer at the welfare and immigration numbers.
Universal Credit
Universal credit was introduced in 2014 to replace an assortment of working age benefits. Claimants input their infinitely varied personal circumstances and UC spits out a monthly payment, usually with conditions attached like applying for work and attending appointments at the Job Centre. For people already in low paid or part time work UC will top up their wages. The most important thing to realise about UC is that your payment is determined by your circumstances at point of claiming and subject to a cap. A healthy jobless 24 year old who lives at home with his parents will receive the bare minimum (about £300 a month), a healthy jobless 25 year old partway through a private rental tenancy will receive nearer £1000 a month. A jobless renting couple with two children will receive nearer £2000 a month including council tax benefit and child benefit. A jobless 32 year old with £16,001 in an ISA will receive nothing.
Though many claimants are honest, some will mysteriously alter their personal circumstances (either by rearranging their lives or simply by lying) to receive larger amounts. Claimants usually fight back against denied claims assisted by Citizen’s Advice, by requesting “Mandatory Reconsiderations” of decisions, and by asking the helpful folk of the DWPHelp subreddit.
As of May 2023 there are nearly 6 million Universal credit claimants. One third are in low paid or part time work, one third are looking for work, and one third have no requirement to look for work and simply receive their monthly payments with no strings attached. The latter group has grown rapidly, and is mostly comprised of claimants who have been assessed as having a health condition (which can be chronic or mental) which prevents them from working. In March 2020 all efforts to migrate “legacy benefit claimants” were paused, so most of the growth in UC numbers since then are genuinely “new” claims rather than claimants migrating from older benefit schemes. Overall the number of UC claimants has nearly doubled since March 2020.
Personal Independence Payment
PIP is a disability benefit intended for the most severely disabled people, who not only cannot work but also struggle with daily tasks like getting dressed. It is received in addition to UC. Claimants with physical ailments must prove in a face-to-face assessment that they cannot perform simple tasks like picking up a pen. Claimants with mental ailments have an easier time of it, simply stating that they are too depressed to pick up a pen. The result is that 44% of new PiP claimants now have psychiatric disorders rather than physical disabilities. When you add the number of PIP claimants to the number of people still receiving the older DLA payments there are around 4 million brits in total on disability benefits.
I recently tweeted about a redditor who is claiming PIP and UC for ADHD/ anxiety/ depression. He posts about his varied interests, technical questions about reasonably complex issues, and his >£300 a month “medical cannabis” habit. If he pays rent he’s now entitled to a total of £1600 a month with no conditions attached in perpetuity - the same income as somebody with a job earning £23,000 a year.
It’s not necessary to believe these claimants are lying to see that this is a misguided approach. This guy probably does suffer from feelings of depression and anxiety. The thought of attending a job interview probably fills him with the same level of adrenaline as a young student on the end of a hilarious “prank robbery”.
Young people with common and treatable mental health conditions like depression and anxiety are offered lifelong benefits but very little help for their condition, which seems almost completely backwards. With neither a carrot or a stick to change their ways we are abandoning these people to long-term misery.
Immigration
In 2022 net migration rose to over 500,000. This figure includes around half a million study visas (135,000 of these were for families of students, which can include boyfriends and girlfriends). These students and their adult dependents (boyfriends/ girlfriends) have unrestricted rights to work for the duration of their degree and two years after. The net migration figure also includes around 300,000 work visas to non EU citizens, granted to people earning at least £26,200 a year (this threshold can be lower in “shortage occupations”). People can quibble over the exact details but it would be fair to broadly characterise this as “mass low-skilled immigration”.
The great Rishplacement
Getting people off welfare and into work is difficult, but the Coalition government did have significant success in this area, at the expense of being despised by a chunk of the population. Rishi is governing as if he wants to not only (understandably) avoid a recession in the short term, but also to be the sort of Tory who isn’t booed by the crowd at a Paralympic games.
There is no reason to believe the 2 million new workless UC claimants since 2020 are doomed to be perennially useless and unemployable people. I would prefer to train a friendly confident Indian student to be a waiter than a surly unemployed Brit, but I think both tasks are within the realms of possibility. The Rishi approach buys us better customer service and easier hiring at the expense of higher taxes to pay for the long term unemployed, even higher rents pumped up by increased housing demand, and millions of miserable Brits left on the benefits scrapheap. The government is cynically and blatantly abandoning the bottom 5% of Brits for short-term gain, and when the public eventually notices this the Tories will be deservedly wiped out.