Chair of government’s ‘economic inactivity’ board says he wants to ‘ramp down’ use of benefit sanctions and strict conditions on sick and disabled people

The academic tasked by ministers with leading efforts to tackle “spiralling” levels of “economic inactivity” has said he wants to “rethink welfare” by “ramping down” the use of strict conditions and sanctions on sick and disabled people.

The comments by Professor Paul Gregg, who is chairing the government’s new Labour Market Advisory Board, may ease the concerns of some disabled activists after recent comments by work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall.

When she announced his appointment, Kendall made it clear that the board’s key aim was tackling the “spiralling inactivity” caused by a record number of people out of work due to long-term sickness.

She has spoken recently of sending work coaches into mental health wards (see separate story), and has also confirmed that the government’s plans for a new fraud bill – ordering banks to “spy” on the bank accounts of benefit claimants – would be based on draft laws prepared by the last government.

She also shared a platform at Labour’s annual conference with an outsourcing giant linked to the deaths of disabled benefit claimants.

And prime minister Sir Keir Starmer recently suggested in an interview with the BBC that all claimants of long-term sickness benefits would be expected to look for work under Labour’s social security reforms.

But Gregg, who was delivering an online lecture yesterday (Wednesday) on Understanding and Reducing Economic Inactivity, stressed that he wanted to focus on “ramping down conditionality”.

He was responding to a question from Disability News Service (watch from 43 minutes), which asked why his lecture had not yet covered the issue of safeguarding of disabled people on out-of-work disability benefits, highlighting the “disastrous” impact of the coalition government’s post-2010 efforts to push disabled claimants off those benefits.

Gregg, who is director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Policy at the University of Bath and has studied the UK labour market for several decades, said: “Conditionality is part of the problem we have here.

“I’m not wanting to say that what we’re doing is going to move lots of sick and disabled people into a highly conditioned, conditional, sanctioning kind of welfare system.

“That’s totally not what I think needs to go on.

“The sanctioning conditionality system is part of the problem here. It’s definitely not part of the solution.

“So we need to rethink welfare in terms of that intense pressure. Yes, safeguarding, yes, yes, there needs to be some.”

Gregg conducted a review of personalised support and conditionality in the social security system for DWP in 2009 and helped design employment and support allowance (ESA), but he was later highly critical of the work capability assessment (WCA), the test used to determine eligibility for ESA and which was linked with hundreds, and probably thousands, of deaths.

He said yesterday that there needed to be “fast tracking”, so claimants are “put into places which [are] appropriate for the health conditions they have”.

But he said the government also needed to “develop a system that’s built around the needs, capabilities, and desires of the individual, not waving a big stick”.

He said that being out of work was “extremely damaging to people” and was “often damaging to their health and… it’s certainly damaging to their earnings capacity and living standards, and if you’re young, then that’s really extreme in terms of the damage it does”.

But he said that that “doesn’t mean that you’re forcing people to work”.

He also suggested that there needed to be an “integrated package” that was “engaging people in terms of thinking about work, offering supports in terms of workplace, offering support in terms of health conditions, and connecting people with employers who are potentially sympathetic enough to accommodate people with health conditions”.

He said earlier in the lecture that the number of economically inactive people had increased by almost one million since just before the start of the pandemic, so it had now risen from about 20 per cent of the working age population to almost 25 per cent, with a significant proportion of this increase people who were “inactive” due to long-term health problems.

Much of this, he said, was due to young people (those under 35), with “big increases in people being economically inactive for reasons of mental health, principally anxiety and depression”, while increases in the state pension age were “pulling older people into the working-age population”.

He said the low proportion of young people returning to work after health-related issues was “potentially writing off a section of society from the workplace”, which was “very, very scary” and was “sort of driving the concerns now that we need to do something quite radical to try and change this”.

The lecture was part of a series hosted by the centre-right thinktank Bright Blue, which had close links to the last Conservative government.

Picture: Liz Kendall (left) and Paul Gregg

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