The number of people claiming disability benefit in the UK has been rising for several years, and it
seems likely that it will continue to rise; so doing nothing means having to find more money.
The way I perceive things and for simplicity there are two categories of disabled people:
(a) those who simply can not work at all
(b) those with a limited ability to work who could do some work,
but not without help or workplace adjustments or for long hours, or as productively as others.
They therefore find it impossible to obtain employment for their skillset.
Let me explain.
And for this purpose as a simplification, I regard the UK employment market as divided into two sectors;
(i) a high credential, qualification and experience sector subject to significant statutory regulation whereby
it takes time and money to enter and often also to stay accredited e.g anaesthetists, barristers, doctors,
dentists, electricians, nurses, oncologists, pilots, solicitors, surgeons, teachers, veterinary surgeons etc
(ii) all other areas (not highly credential).
There is a shortage of people for the credential sector (i) primarily because neither private industry nor
the state are prepared to train adequate numbers. This means that the UK has become excessively
dependent upon importing foreigners or living with service gaps. And because it is possible to import foreigners,
albeit often at great overall cost (because the marginal cost of paying foreigners with credentials to migrate here)
pushes the salary rate up for all), the adequacy of domestic supply is ignored. This has an inflationary effect, and
it also means that many of those UK citizens who could be trained are not and are thus denied a career path.
Organisations in the other non credential sector (ii) are primarily commercial and are driven by the
desire to boost corporate profits, or more prosaically merely to survive, to seek to obtain employees
who are at least as productive if not more so than those employees employed by their competitors.
They simply do NOT want to employ any less productive employees; and with typically 10, 20, 50
applicants for each vacancy; the employment agents can very easily screen out the more obviously
less productive people e.g. the disabled with only a limited ability to do some work.
I do not believe that the UK government can resolve this without substantially changing
the employment market, and it can not do that without challenging the hierarchy of the
financial capitalists. And neither Keir Starmer nor Rachel Reeves are prepared to do that.
Sadly the policy of free trade and the resulting requirement for UK employers to remain
competitive both with each other e.g. subcontractor v subcontractor and with international
competitors means there is much less space to employ the less advantaged i.e. the disabled.
And as the hyper competitiveness of the non credential sector has risen the cut off point where
a minor disability results in the de facto exclusion from the labour market now operates at a
lower level of disability, and that is in my opinion the main reason why the numbers are rising.
There are other factors, disabilities rise with age so raising the starting point by expanding tertiary
education and raising the state pension age has meant that the generally employed age group has
itself become older (21 to 67) rather than (16 to 60/65), and so has many more people with disabilities.
