Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak has promised to cut welfare spending by £12 billion by restricting recipients’ ability to declare mental illnesses such as anxiety as disabilities.
Speaking to the Mail on Sunday, the Prime Minister said he was determined to end the “lifestyle choice” of not working.
Spending on benefits for working-age people with disabilities or health problems is expected to rise from £69 billion to £90 billion by the end of the next parliament. Mr Sunak said: “We’ve seen a massive increase in welfare spending since the pandemic. We need to support people to get into work, because fundamentally, work is good for them.”
“We have to provide people with the right support in the right way, including providing them with mental health treatment support.”
He added: “We need to ensure that the welfare system is a safety net and not a lifestyle choice. We need to be careful about over-medicalising the challenges of everyday life and recognise that work can have a very positive impact on people’s mental health.”
Other developments:
- Senior Labour leaders have said the party will renegotiate Brexit to restore freedom of movement, and Fiona Urquhart, head of Labour International, the group tasked with rallying Britons abroad to vote Labour in next month’s general election, has also pledged to field a special MP in Westminster for British citizens in the EU.
- A Mail on Sunday poll predicts Labour will win a majority of 416 seats.
- Mr Sunak said he had been “in contact” with Boris Johnson about the former prime minister’s role in the election campaign.
- The defector Reform Party candidate claims Mr Sunak made a mistake in judgement over the commemoration of the Normandy landings because his grandparents did not fight in the war.
- The finance minister, former head of Michael Gove’s Surrey Heath constituency, resigned after writing a letter accusing ministers of “conspiracy, subterfuge and dishonesty” and “serious errors of judgement”.
Since the pandemic began, the number of people taking time off work for health reasons has risen by 40%, from 2 million to 2.8 million. People are three times more likely to be deemed unfit for any job than they were 10 years ago, and more than half of those people are taking time off work for mental health reasons such as anxiety or depression.
The Conservatives will introduce a £700 million “major reform of NHS mental health treatment”, including ensuring half a million more people a year have access to talking therapy by 2030, and “tighten up” the way the welfare system assesses ability to work. This will include overhauling the process of issuing “fitness certificates” by transferring responsibility for doing so from GPs to “specialist and medical professionals”.
The party also plans to introduce tougher sanctions, including completely cancelling welfare benefits, for those who are capable of working but refuse to find a suitable job after a year on them.
Mr Sunak said: “Work is a source of dignity, purpose and hope and I want to enable everyone to overcome all the barriers they face to living an independent and fulfilling life. That’s why we’ve announced a major boost to our mental health work and reforms to ensure that everyone who can work can do so.”
