Every three months, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) updates the full UK welfare picture. It’s a big task and there’s a six-month lag — but the resulting picture is the biggest scandal in politics. It shows that now, with a worker shortage crisis so acute that immigration has been running at a million a year, 5.4 million are being kept on out-of-work benefits (as categorised by the DWP) This figure includes those on sickness benefit who are excluded from the official unemployment figure.
It’s a huge waste of money but, far worse, a waste of human potential. Tens of thousands are, once again, being written off. The progress of the Iain Duncan Smith era was washed away by lockdown and things are back to where they were. And things are expected to get (much) worse: we have the whole story on this section of the data hub. I’ve written here about the integrity of the methodology.
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