The UK’s Employment Minister, Alison McGovern, has announced a forthcoming overhaul of the current system for assessing health-related benefits, critiquing its expense and inefficiency.
Speaking at a Blackpool job fair, McGovern highlighted the plan to abandon the present work capability assessment (WCA), which she argues compels claimants to overstate their illnesses and overlooks their potential and desires.
The assessment, she asserts, fails to capture what individuals could achieve with appropriate support, focusing instead on their limitations.
Labour‘s radical reform aims to reshape the welfare framework to foster employment among those currently receiving incapacity benefits, estimated to include about 200,000 individuals eager to work immediately.
This initiative coincides with a government green paper, set to be published this month, which seeks to integrate more people into the workforce and curtail the burgeoning costs of health-related benefits, projected to escalate to £100bn annually by decade’s end if unaddressed.
The WCA’s elimination is a contentious issue, given its potential impact on individuals with serious, long-term health conditions.
Critics argue that the current system, which provides incapacity benefits significantly increasing recipients’ income, offers no incentive or support for finding employment, thereby exacerbating public spending on these benefits, already at £65bn a year.
The Department for Work and Pensions, alongside the Treasury, is considering a unified assessment system to replace the bifurcated structure of means-tested and disability-specific benefits.
This reform is intended to provide more nuanced, possibly time-limited support, while also contributing to necessary fiscal savings, highlighted as a priority in the upcoming Spring Statement.
This overhaul, as McGovern stresses, is vital not just for fiscal sustainability but also to prevent the tragic waste of talent represented by the current system.
The discussion comes as new data reveals nearly a million young people were classified as neither employed, educated, nor in training at the end of 2024, underscoring the urgency of reform in supporting broader societal engagement and productivity.
