More than 250,000 people have been warned that they could have their benefits ‘removed entirely’ under a new welfare crackdown announced by the Prime Minister.
In a speech on Friday morning, Rishi Sunak said benefit claimants who are unemployed for more than 12 months despite being deemed fit to work could have their benefits stopped as he announced a new crackdown on ‘sick note culture’.
He said payments from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to more than a quarter of a million people could be ended as part of the new plans, which aim to reduce the number of people out of work due to long-term sickness.
Speaking at the Centre for Social Justice in London, Mr Sunak said: “More than 500,000 people have been unemployed for six months and well over a quarter of a million have been unemployed for 12 months. These are people with no medical conditions that prevent them from working and who will have benefitted from intensive employment support and training programmes.
“There is no reason those people should not be working, especially when we have almost 1 million job vacancies. So we will now look at options to strengthen our regime.
Anyone who doesn’t comply with the conditions set by their Work Coach such as accepting an available job will, after 12 months, have their claim closed and their benefits removed entirely.”
As of February, more than 2.8 million people in the UK are “economically inactive” due to ill health, an increase of a third, while government spending on sickness benefits has increased by £27 billion, the government said.
Mr Sunak decried the growing number of young workers becoming long-term sick, saying: “There’s nothing compassionate about leaving a generation of young people to sit alone in the dark before a flickering screen watching as their dreams slip further from reach every single day.”
The prime minister described claiming benefits as a “lifestyle choice” for some and said that the reforms would “make the system fairer and harder to exploit,” by demanding greater evidence for Personal Independence Payment (PIP) claims and making it more difficult to qualify for the benefit.
