How To Get Britain Working

We are heading for difficult times. In the shadow of Lockdown, war in Europe, and global economic instability, Britain is sliding back into the “Two Nations” of the Victorian era marked by a widening gulf between mainstream society and a depressed and poverty-stricken underclass.

For all the rhetoric about economic growth as a panacea for the nation’s ills, the Government is looking to the welfare system to fund new defence spending as the spiralling cost of benefits and loss of human potential are threatening our economy, public services and communities.
This is not a new phenomenon. Many of these issues have evolved over the long-term, root causes of poverty which the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) first reported on in our report, Breakdown Britain, 20 years ago.

We still believe that work is the best route out of poverty, but the fact is that today people are turning to welfare, rather than wages, in order to unlock additional income. Britain is sick but being sick pays.

Economic inactivity is at a record high. More than three million people are claiming Britain’s main benefit without any obligation to look for work, up from 1.5 million in January 2022. Some 650,000 more people are out of work due to long-term sickness than at the start of the pandemic, and spending on disability and incapacity benefits is forecast to increase by more than £18 billion, to £70 billion, over the next five years.

‘How to Get Britain Working’ calls on the Government to embrace a once in a lifetime opportunity to deliver welfare reform: delivering both economic and human benefit to ensure more people are in work and benefitting from work. In turn, the benefits bill would contract and tax returns increase.