25 Percent of Working Age Brits Are Out of Work. Why Is the U.K. Government Paying Millions To Stay Home?
Britain’s invisible people are caught in a welfare trap.
In September 2022, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson claimed he was leaving office with "unemployment…down to lows not seen since I was about 10 years old and bouncing around on a space hopper." In reality, the number of people who were economically inactive had risen by almost 400,000, and an enormous rise in the number of people claiming long-term sickness benefits was already underway.
How did Johnson get away with claiming unemployment was exceptionally low? Government unemployment statistics only look at those who are actively looking for work. If someone is studying, a caregiver, or categorized as long-term sick, they are classed as "economically inactive" and are not counted as unemployed.
In the United Kingdom, one-quarter of the working-age population is currently out of work. (For comparison, in the United States, a similar statistic finds that only 16.6 percent of people in prime working ages are out of the labor force.) Once someone becomes economically inactive due to health reasons, their chances of ever reentering employment within a year drop to 3.8 percent. Up to 3,000 new people per day are writing off work and being approved for sickness benefits, now totaling around 4 million people.
These are Britain's invisible people.
According to a survey published in 2024, a quarter of all Britons say they are disabled. The Department for Work and Pensions says that's a 40 percent increase in the past decade.
The real surprise is the tens of thousands of young people who are now economically inactive due to long-term sickness. A National Health Service (NHS) Confederation report showed that in 2021–22, over 63,000 people went straight from studying to being economically inactive due to long-term sickness. In 2002, mental and behavioral problems were the main condition for 25 percent of claimants. In 2024, that figure rose to 44 percent. More than half of the rise in disability claims since 2019 was due to mental health or behavioral conditions, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.
What is going on?
About 69 percent of those who apply for sickness benefits mention depression, anxiety, or some other kind of mental or behavioral disorder. Mental illness is now being cited by 48 percent of disabled working Brits, making mental health the single biggest problem. Mental illness, quite clearly, is responsible for a large portion of the spike in claimants.
According to data collected by the TaxPayers' Alliance, a total of 1.75 million people in England received enhanced personal independence payments (PIP) in April 2025, an increase from 734,136 in January 2019. PIP is just one of many types of social security available to working-age claimants, intended to help them deal with the extra costs of disability. It is available to those in work. However, only one-sixth of PIP recipients are working. Some are receiving these benefits for seemingly minor ailments, including acne, constipation, obesity, "old age," irritable bowel syndrome, writer's cramp, and food intolerances. (Thirteen people received PIP for factitious disorders in April.) The largest increases, though, were for mental health disorders. In 2019, the number of PIP claimants for autism was 26,256, and by April 2025, this number had jumped to 114,211. For anxiety and depression, it went from 23,647 in 2019, to 110,075 in April 2025. For ADHD, in the same period, it went from 4,233 to 37,339.
As ludicrous as this sounds, approximately 80 percent of PIP claimants are not in work at all. A person getting incapacity benefits and PIP could be getting 23,899 pounds (roughly $32,250), which is already more than the minimum wage. Someone with children is entitled to even more. When PIP is combined with housing benefits, universal credit, and other offerings, someone could be entitled to 27,354 pounds (roughly $37,000) without paying taxes.
Many of these people may well suffer from mental health conditions that make work a struggle. However, in economic terms, the incentives are entirely off. If you can earn more by claiming benefits than you can working, why would you try to work?
These are real people with real potential. Amy from Keighley is 30, looks after her 8-year-old son, and gets long-term sickness benefits. "I do suffer with mental health issues…[complex post-traumatic stress disorder], anxiety, and depression, and things like that," she said in the documentary Britain's Benefits Scandal. She has never held a full-time job. She expressed a desire to work but said she's trapped by the system. "If I went and got a job tomorrow, everything I get would stop from today. Which would then mean that my rent, everything would stop….Where does that leave my 8-year-old?" She said that after taxes, she would need to earn 35,000 pounds ($47,292) a year to replicate the package she is on now.
People like Amy are simply making economic decisions. Would anyone be reasonably expected to risk swapping the security of welfare dependency for the uncertainty of low-paid work in the private sector?
This is the welfare trap.
It has left Britain in a situation where taxpayers are footing the bill for over 120 billion pounds a year on working-age benefits alone. This is financially unsustainable—not to mention immoral to expect the rest of society to bear the brunt of these costs.
It is also a tragic waste of human potential. These are people that the state has consigned to a lifetime of worklessness. Where is the evidence that, for those with poor mental health, the best thing for them is to be told to stay at home and never work? Work gives people dignity, structure, and a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Well-intentioned politicians have failed. This year, the Labour Party government tried to make minor cuts to PIP and faced an enormous rebellion from within the party, resulting in a U-turn. It is a welfare policy crisis, a big government crisis, and a warning to the rest of the world that well-intentioned "generous" welfare benefits can inadvertently end up wasting so many people's lives.
In the U.S., this is increasingly becoming the case. The American welfare system is costing well over $1.2 trillion a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office, encompassing more than 80 federal programs. The system discourages beneficiaries from seeking work. In 1979, American families living below the poverty line earned about 60 percent of their income from work. In 2021, that number had dropped to an all-time low of around 25 percent. Pandemic-era benefits and increased eligibility accelerated these trends. The increased size of the social "safety net" created a cycle of dependency, trapping people in poverty.
Almost half of the American population lives in a household where at least one person receives some form of government benefit. The increasing size of the welfare state, just as in Britain, is creating a culture of dependency.
There is nothing compassionate about a system that wastes millions of lives. Britain's sickness is a warning to the world. When the state pays people to give up on themselves, many will. For people to flourish, they must not be told they are too broken to work; they should be told they are capable of so much more.
