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There's an article here on the 5 million problem, that talks about Universal Credit and ponders what's gone wrong. Telegraph is usually paywalled but you may be able to find a way around:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/06/02/benefits-britain...

Firstly, he tackles the bogus claim that it's to do with Brexit:

"Immigration has bounced back. There is no Brexit-sized hole in our workforce; not anymore. Immigrants now account for one in five workers in Britain, the highest ratio ever."

Then he tackles the definitions used for unemployment stats:

"The low unemployment claim is a mirage. Britain has, in fact, been suffering a period of mass joblessness as big as any in our recent history. The proportion of people who are neither in work or looking for it is higher now than it was in the mid-1970s. More than five million people were claiming out-of-work benefits at the last count – a figure as big as the population of Scotland. But many of them don’t count as unemployed, because they’re not looking for jobs. So – presto! – they vanish from the national debate."

Parts of the UK have become massively dependent on benefits:

"In Blackpool, official figures show 26 per cent on out-of-work benefits. In Middlesbrough it was 23 per cent, in Hartlepool 22 per cent, in Manchester, it’s 18 per cent."

Why doesn't the Universal Credit system fix that? It's as I said:

"Why? How did we get here? How did Universal Credit, the flagship reform of the Cameron era, start to produce the problems that it was designed to solve? It was created with strings of conditionality on welfare payments, with sanctions imposed if people turned down jobs or missed face-to-face meetings. During lockdown, the conditions were abandoned – and never properly restored. So the new system has started to trap people in welfare as surely as the old one did. It has started to become an issue in Cabinet."

I could see the byline was Fraser Nelson, so I'm not going to bother with that piece of propaganda.

> More than five million people were claiming out-of-work benefits at the last count

The government thinks that's 1.5m.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peoplenotin...

edit: look, the problem with basing solutions on a nonsense assessment of the problem is it doesn't work. We've been round this with disability benefit; it was made much harder to claim by simply rejecting a very large number of valid claims upfront. A bogus appeal process through ASOS was put in place to further deplete people's ability to claim. However, once the claims got in front of a real court or external appeal, the majority were upheld.

There isn't a hidden army of the idle.

As usual the Telegraph publishes stuff that an intellectually normal 14 year old would be ashamed of thinking.

> Immigration has bounced back. There is no Brexit-sized hole in our workforce; not anymore. Immigrants now account for one in five workers in Britain, the highest ratio ever.

There are 33 million employed people in the UK. One in five is 6.6 million.

There are 6 million foreigners in the UK: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

We must deduct that Mr. Fraser Nelson is describing an economy where newborns work, probably aiding 600’000 foreign zombies. Or one is still an immigrant after 10 years and even after naturalisation?

> The proportion of people who are neither in work or looking for it is higher now than it was in the mid-1970s.

Employment rate is at 76%, as high as Germany and higher than in the mid-70s. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/employment-rate

I don’t have time to research the benefit data but it’s not necessary because Mr. Fraser Nelson has totalled the bullshit meter. Maybe these work lazy Britons should get a job as Telegraph editorialists? They don’t publish articles anymore, so I’m sure they need some help and the bar doesn’t seem too high.

The source data does not support his (and by proxy, your) points.

The bulk of the growth in claimant count came from Feb 17 to Mar 20 - it nearly doubled over that period, when conditionality of benefits was in full swing. It simply does not follow that conditionality reduces claimant count.

In any case, conditionality was reinstated in July 20, and unless you or Fraser can precisely define how conditionality was "not properly restored", I'm going to take the government's word on it.

Per his tweet, https://twitter.com/FraserNelson/status/1530206631195201536/..., we can see in his computation of those on out-of-work benefits he includes pension credit (what demographic receives this, I wonder?), and 1.7M people on INCAP - the various disability allowances, the majority of whose claimants will, due to the closure of the old schemes to new claimants, be on the modern ESA benefit where eligiblity is assessed by an independent healthcare professional. For example, as my mother withered away in her final months, bedbound with oesophogal cancer, she became eligible for ESA, and contrary to one of your other comments to another poster about the 5 million, she most assuredly was dying.

Note also that UC is in turn becoming a replacement for ESA. He did not avail himself of the facility on Stat-Xplore to breakdown those aggregated UC figures into the "out-of-work" and "no work requirement" figures - they are 2,103,346 "out of work" and 1,399,843 "no work requirement" - no work requirement being defined in https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/dwp-statistical-s... as "those who are not expected to work at present, such as those for whom Health or caring responsibility prevents claimant from working or preparing for work"

Thus, the 5 million figure is inflated by a mere 3.1 million people who are either retired or who have been assessed as having some inability to work.

I would suggest critically examining the source stats instead of uncritically accepting the interpretation of right-wing journalists with an agenda, though I fear you share said agenda...

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