A growing number of Britons are on disability benefits
The government’s attempts to cut the welfare bill miss the bigger picture
In a community centre in Northampton, a town in central England, a group of mental-health patients are learning how to navigate the benefits system. A young mother with psychosis wants to know how a new job will affect her payments; a man with severe anxiety struggles to support his autistic son. Their guide to the welfare state, an ex-adviser to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), is sympathetic but slips unthinkingly into jargon. “Forgive me if I speak in TLAs,” he says.
Explore more
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “The costs of benefits ”
Britain May 4th 2024
- Labour is the big beneficiary of Scottish political turmoil
- Why so many Britons have taken to stand-up paddleboarding
- The fight over one of Britain’s last steel plants
- Questions grow over the future of the London stockmarket
- A rare Brexit dividend for British farmers
- A growing number of Britons are on disability benefits
- Jeremy Clarkson, patron saint of the Great British bore
From the May 4th 2024 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionDiscover more
British MPs vote in favour of assisted dying
A monumental social reform is closer to being realised
The slow death of a Labour buzzword
And what that says about Britain’s place in the world
Britain’s Supreme Court considers what a woman is
At last. Britons had been wondering what those 34m people who are not men might be
Can potholes fuel populism?
A new paper looks at one explanation for the rise of Reform UK
Are British voters as clueless as Labour’s intelligentsia thinks?
How the idea of false consciousness conquered the governing party