This note follows the conference speech by the Chancellor on 23 September 2024 concerning the new government’s ideas around “making work pay” in advance of the October Budget, and the possible implications for DWP and disabled people.

I am suggesting that some rapid thinking and lobbying might need to be done ahead of the Budget, for the following reasons.

Background

In the 1990s the policy of the New Labour government was that “work pays” and the thinking was that – being in work brings all manner of additional wellbeing benefits to a person and their family in terms of better health, better educational achievements for their children, and more dignity and social cohesion. The argument was that unemployment benefits had been considered to be “a price worth paying” by the Thatcher governments in the 1980s in order to crush trades unions and deindustrialise the UK, and where sympathetic GPs signed off unemployed people as sick because the benefit payments were higher. The darker side of work was glossed over in this 1990s policy: the pressures, the fatigue, the loss of autonomy, and frankly the obligation to spend your time with some colleagues who could be quite obnoxious at times, certainly not people you would invite into your home. For many people there was also the experiences of workplace bullying, discrimination and harassment, or worse.

Into the 2000s the “work pays” details were probably best shown in practice in the New Labour government’s New Deal for Disabled People, and in the generous Child Tax Credits used to reimburse working parents for additional costs.

In the 2010s with the Conservative Coalition government and austerity cuts, the “work pays” philosophy was twisted so that in-work benefits became a lifeline to support people in low paid and insecure employment, basically the state was subsidising cheap labour. Reportedly 70% of benefit payments were to people in low paid work, only 30% of benefits went to unemployed people. The tax credits were savagely removed and later replaced with the two-child benefit cap. Alongside this was a hostile environment for people on out-of-work benefits to drive them into the labour market. This DWP’s hostile environment and the resulting hundreds (at least) of documented additional deaths are investigated and detailed in the recent book The Department by John Pring.

So far in the 2020s we have seen what some people have called The Great Resignation in 2022 following the pandemic when reportedly over 400,000 people below the retirement age left the UK labour market. There is speculation about the reasons for this, probably being a collection of factors including disillusionment with corporate office work and relentless miserable commuting, mental health issues which were created by or increased by lockdowns and isolation, and possibly realising the futility of working with pre-school age children in the family where all the disposable income is consumed by extra childcare costs.

Possible changes ahead

So, on the positive side it might be the intention of the 2020s version of “work pays” that by increasing the minimum wage and removing insecurity such as zero-hours contracts, the state is wanting to reduce its subsidy of in-work benefits to cheap labour employers without reducing the money that working people receive. Pre-school state childcare could also see a revival, and many campaigners want to see the return of Sure Start everywhere.

However, on the negative side it might be that the hostile “push” will continue to drive non-working people back into the labour market. This could be explained or justified by a reprise of the 1990s New Labour thinking around the claimed wider personal and social benefits of being in work, almost a social justice argument about the dignity and personal growth from being in work. Thus, the great resignation around mental health pressures will be tackled by arguments that, such people would thrive better in work if only they could understand what is happening to them, and therefore it is a great kindness by the state, indeed a moral obligation, to drop them back into work even though they don’t yet realise it is for their own good.

We can imagine now, for example, that the NHS 111 algorithm for people contacting with a mental health concern might well be pasted into the DWP algorithm for pushing people who are signed off sick with mental health issues back into work, it will be claimed with “support” such as cheap and scalable online CBT. We will be told it is “win-win” for people’s wellbeing and economic growth.

Conclusion

But until the documented additional deaths have been fully investigated and understood, there is a grave risk that the swooping rhetoric of “win-win” will be matched by a reality of further harm and fatalities.