Fit for Purpose? Lessons for Policies to Address the Disability Benefits ‘Crisis’

Abstract

The chapters in this book have examined the disability benefits ‘crisis’ in the UK from a number of perspectives: the labour market, employability, and health. Evidence presented indicates that all three perspectives are important in understanding the rise in the numbers claiming disability benefits. Furthermore, and crucial to an understanding of the nature of the crisis, these three issues interact with each other and have acted together to move a significant proportion of the UK’s working age population on to disability benefits, in many cases never to work again. Large-scale deindustrialisation has been an underlying driving force in the UK context. Mass job destruction and long-term implications for employability and health have combined to produce geographical concentrations of interrelated problems of low demand for labour, low labour market participation, low skills, poor health, and low incomes. Addressing the disability benefits crisis therefore unavoidably confronts longstanding problems in Britain of low investment in industry, weak vocational training infrastructure, poor working conditions and practices, entrenched inequalities in health, and an inflexible benefits system.

Social and employment policy is characterised by its avoidance of questions about the wider system, in favour of a focus on the ‘margins’, and its downplaying of the involuntary dimension of unemployment while opting for a very subjective and personalised approach to the problem.

(Walters, 2000: 9)