Our March Breakfast with Fraser Nelson

As the Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, put the final touches to her remarks announcing the Government’s long-awaited plans to reform the welfare system to incentivise work, we were delighted to welcome Fraser Nelson, Columnist at The Times and long-campaigner on the issue of inactivity and worklessness, for our March Jobs Foundation breakfast. In fortunate timing, Fraser led a discussion on the roots of Britain’s current worklessness crisis and how we can get more people into employment. 

This is a topic core to the purpose of the Jobs Foundation. We know that a good job is the best route out of poverty, so we will always advocate to make sure that more people are able to access a good job or training scheme, and benefit from the opportunities that this provides. The fact that there are currently over nine million adults in the UK economically inactive, including nearly 3m on long-term sickness and nearly a million young people not in employment, education or training is a shocking waste of human potential, and we must play our part in a national mission to get Britian back to work.

Addressing this, Fraser opened his remarks by highlighting the fact that just before the pandemic, we had the highest employment figures in our nation’s history, pointing to things like tax cuts for the low paid and previous reforms to welfare as helping encourage and support more people into employment. For Fraser, this infers that policies we have taken since the pandemic are the source of the fact that we have had such an explosion in inactivity, as opposed to certain narratives that “people don’t want to work”. 

A key problem that Fraser argued is that in our current welfare system, it can be entirely rational for someone to claim benefits as opposed to entering a job. Certain groups would need to earn significant salaries to match what they receive in benefits, making employment an unattractive option. Similarly, those attempting to retrain or upskill face being completely cut-off from benefits entitlements for entering employment – with Fraser giving the story of a plasterer trying to enter the workforce – leaving them trapped in dependency and not able to experience the opportunities of a job (notably, in Kendall’s speech later in the afternoon, the Government announced a new ‘Right to Try’ guarantee whereby people will have the right to try working, without losing their benefits).

Nelson noted that 70% of new sickness claims are related to mental health, with 90% signed off by GPs, raising concerns about how easily people are being written off. Every day, 2,000 working-age people are classified as long-term sick, a trend he called the “decommissioning of British workers.” This means that by the end of this Parliament, the UK will have lost a workforce equivalent to the population of Birmingham.

Referring to research conducted by the Centre for Economic and Business Research, Fraser emphasised the economic consequences of this crisis. If two million more people were working, the UK could generate an additional £30 billion in tax revenue while saving £10 billion in welfare costs.

Fraser also highlighted the work of our Research Director, Nick Tyrone – mentioning Nick’s experience of travelling the country, meeting with young people who had no family experience of employment, but when given the right support, could go on to thrive in the workplace. Our foundational research, Two Million Jobs,was pointed to as a blueprint for how we can help support more people into work.