Robert Jenrick MP, the former Tory who now skulks beside Nigel Farage on the Reform bench in Parliament, thinks Britain has what he calls a welfare problem. In itself, that is not a term I recognise. The UK's social safety net is not a welfare system; it provides social security.
But the real issue is not that: I think Jenrick has deliberately missed a much bigger problem, which is that Britain has an employment problem. If he is pointing a finger of blame, he is doing so in the wrong direction.
Writing in the Telegraph to promote Reform UK's proposed reform of disability and sickness benefits, Jenrick argues that too many people, particularly young people with mental health problems, are being abandoned on benefits when they should instead be helped back into work.
His argument is that work provides a person with structure, purpose and social contact and that, as a result, putting people on long-term benefits can sometimes make their situation worse rather than better.
There is an element of truth in that argument. There is nothing compassionate about abandoning someone who wants to work to a life in which no one asks what they might be able to do, what support they need, or how they might participate in society. It is true that work can provide some people with purpose, company, income and a sense of belonging. I agree that a social security system should not presume that someone who has experienced anxiety, depression or another illness has nothing to contribute through work.
But Jenrick's argument has a gaping hole in it. He assumes that if people currently receiving benefits could be persuaded, encouraged or, most especially, compelled to look for work, employment would be available for them. He offers almost no evidence that this is true.
I am sure that there is good reason for that. He must know that those jobs do not exist. The latest official figures from the Office for National Statistics make that clear. UK unemployment is now around five per cent. The situation among young people is considerably worse, with unemployment exceeding ten per cent on the usual measures.
At the same time, vacancies have been falling. There are already substantially more officially unemployed people than there are jobs available, with the ONS saying there are 2.5 unemployed people for every vacancy in the UK at present, even before Jenrick potentially adds millions of people to the queue who are currently receiving sickness and disability benefits.
This matters because Jenrick is confusing two quite different economic issues. Some people who have been unable to work can reach the point where they want to. They can receive treatment, advice and support to do so. I do not dispute that. They may want the structure, income, and social life that employment can provide. But none of those things will create a job for them.
Jenrick is, in other words, offering a microeconomic explanation without providing a macroeconomic explanation for why his proposal will work. He is looking at an individual who is not working and asking what is wrong with that person's incentives, circumstances or state of mind. But unemployment cannot be understood simply by adding together millions of individual decisions about whether or not to work.
As Keynes explained almost a century ago, the economy must also have sufficient demand for labour. If there are fewer jobs than people wanting them, some people must, as a matter of arithmetic, remain unemployed. Jenrick is ignoring that and is instead seeking to make matters much worse for those currently receiving social security payments to help them manage their situations.
There is another dimension to this. An extraordinary contradiction at the heart of current British economic policy is almost always ignored when discussion turns to employment. Most politicians seem to have overlooked the fact that the Bank of England has deliberately maintained high interest rates as part of its attempt to control inflation, and that the purpose of that policy is to suppress demand in the economy.
Those setting these high rates assume they will discourage investment, increase borrowing costs, reduce disposable incomes, and constrain consumption. As a result, they believe businesses facing weaker demand will invest less and require fewer workers. That is the outcome they seek. In that case, a weaker labour market is not simply an unfortunate and unforeseen consequence of tight monetary policy. It is one of the mechanisms through which that policy is intended to reduce inflation.
We do, therefore, have one part of the British state (of which the Bank of England is most definitely a part) pursuing an economic policy intended to weaken demand for labour while politicians, seemingly totally unaware of this, simultaneously complain that too many people are not working. The Bank of England is deliberately creating the conditions in which unemployment is rising, while Robert Jenrick is proposing that people who cannot find employment should suffer income reductions because they have failed to obtain jobs that economic policy has deliberately ensured do not exist.
That contradiction destroys much of the logic underpinning Jenrick's proposal. To demonstrate that, just suppose, for the sake of argument, that his reforms worked exactly as intended. Suppose hundreds of thousands of people currently receiving sickness and disability benefits were reassessed, received treatment and employment support, and became willing and able to work. What would happen? They would simply join an already substantial queue of people seeking an inadequate number of jobs, and may receive very little financial support while searching in vain for a job the Bank of England is deliberately denying them.
Jenrick does, therefore, need to answer a question that is almost entirely absent from his argument, which is where are the jobs he thinks people should be taking? But this is just one of several critical questions he must answer.
If he wants potentially millions more people to enter the labour market, how many additional jobs does he expect the economy to create?
Why will it create them?
Where will the new demand come from, especially as his party is planning deep cuts in government spending?
What economic policy does he propose that will create the additional demand required to employ all these people?
Where will those jobs be located?
What skills will they require?
What will they pay?
Will employers recruit people who have histories of mental ill health, disability or prolonged periods outside employment when others might be available?
What happens in those parts of the country where suitable vacancies simply do not exist?
In other words, just what macroeconomic policy underpins his microeconomic thinking? There seems to be none.
That is reflected by failings elsewhere in his argument. What he ignores, or is unaware of, is that if benefits are withdrawn from people who cannot find work, their spending will fall. Those people will then buy less from their local shops and businesses. Aggregate demand will consequently fall, and businesses facing lower demand might employ fewer people. At sufficient scale, this means that a programme supposedly intended to increase employment could contribute to the destruction of employment. This looks much less like a strategy for getting people into work than an austerity programme presented in what Jenrick might think is the language of compassion, but which is anything but that.
(Speaking of language, see my separate post on Jenrick's choice of language on this issue, here).
The real issue, then, is not whether work can be beneficial. Of course it can. Nor is it whether people who can and want to work should be supported in doing so. They should be. The issue is whether our economy actually provides the opportunities that politicians insist people must take.
If Jenrick wants millions more people in employment, he must explain how millions more suitable employment opportunities will be created. He must explain how that objective is compatible with a monetary policy deliberately designed to constrain demand. He must explain what happens when several people are already competing for every vacancy before his reforms add still more people to the labour market. And he must explain why taking income away from someone for whom there is no suitable employment will somehow create a job for them.
Until he answers those questions, Reform's proposal should not be described as a programme for getting people into work. It is a programme for getting people off benefits, and those are very different things.
You cannot solve unemployment by increasing the number of people competing for jobs that do not exist. That is neoliberal thinking gone mad. Nor can politicians claim compassion for people experiencing mental ill health while threatening their incomes and ignoring an economic policy that deliberately suppresses the demand for their labour.
But let me reiterate my key point. If Reform really wants to make social security work, the first question Jenrick must answer is simple: where are the jobs that provide its alternative? Without a policy to create them, nothing Jenrick might say makes any sense.
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[…] my post on Robert Jenrick's proposals, made on behalf of Reform, to change UK policy on health and disability benefits, I mentioned my […]
Milburn is talking about supported internships for those who need special support, in the Guardian here. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/aug/16/special-needs-internships-youth-jobs-crisis-milburn-review this is part of his getting young people into work project. He appears to have overlooked the lack of jobs at the end of the internship, as well.
They always do.
Macroeconomics is beyond them
ex-business partner, south east. Too bloody hot, having a/c installed in the house. Waiting list. Months. The Jenricks (and others which infest the HoC) have zero experience of “the real world”. In the real world, people need to be TRAINED to do jobs such as fitting a/c, installing electrics, plumbing, etc – you know the kind of work that delivers some level of civilisation. Training people requires a) gov resources to fund tech colleges or what ever they are now called b)companies willing to take on apprentices. How’s that working? It ain’t. the tidal wave of “polish plumbers” in the 2000s was indicative of a total failure by tory and LINO/B.Liar (warmonger & bar) alike to train people in areas vital to the UK. That’s cos both groups were equally out of touch, & lets face it working with your hands is to be despised?
I’ll finish this rant with the following, real life example. I have gas central heating with condensing boiler. As the plumber said to me – bloody thing is more like a computer than a boiler (as he linked into it with a lap top). Father and son team also install roof top solar thermal – full works. Their turnover is roughly Euro 1 million per year with 50% of the materials. Go figure. Same comments apply to electricians, those that work with wood, builders, roofers etc. If we had none of these, civilisation would fail. If the Jenricks of this world suddenly disappeared? I’d hazard a guess that the world would be a better place. Remember that next time you vote.
Much to agree with
As I have said before – and of course the plural of anecdote is not data, but Richard it would be interesting to hear Jacqueline’s view on the matter, I would agree with Jenrick in saying that there are undoubtedly a lot of people ‘to sick to work but not well enough to treat’ and a crying need for a National Careers Service that can – amongst other things retrain people who cant work in their current employment for health reasons.
I was wearing one of my favourite if these days rather faded T shirts much to the amusement of the woman from Cats Protection
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTM1ECQA_KZ-sAEuea6s2HSLyjZMnBBNLnwso3g-39–g&s=10
Schrodinger’s Cat Plots its Revenge.
Now we seem to have a similar situation with Jobs to the one with the cat. At the same time as rising unemployment and fewer vacancies so many places seem to be claiming ‘staff shortages’ so can this be explained?
Either – in the Public Sector at least The Government isnt providing the money to employ the number of people needed in some areas eg Mental Health services, and/or there are not enough trained staff available in some areas eg train drivers, or the cost of employing someone isnt covered by the income they generate for the employer, or the ’employment package’ on offer isnt good enough to attract anyone, or its just a ‘all purpose’ excuse.
So what exactly is happening?
Thank you, and that image has caused much amusement in a team where some (not me, I say) like cats a lot, and Schrödinger comes up in conversation more often than normal.
It’s Schrödinger’s mouse I feel sorry for. Being thrown into a box with a 50/50 chance of being eaten.
LOL
Better than the odds with some medical treatments, then.
And on the today programme earlier we are told that the energy price cap rising by 13% in the autumn may increase inflation requiring the Bank of England to raise interest rates. Is this madness or am I missing something. So, the people who are struggling to pay their bills now will face higher bills and so must in addition have their mortgage rates, rents, loan interest increased. Help me understand.
I think the answer is: you are not missing anything. The logic really is perverse.
If the energy price cap rises by 13%, that will directly increase measured inflation because energy is part of the price index. But raising interest rates will not produce a single additional unit of electricity or gas, nor will it reduce the wholesale cost of energy.
Instead, higher interest rates work by reducing demand elsewhere in the economy. They increase mortgage costs, feed through into rents and increase the cost of borrowing for businesses and households. They are intended to make people spend less, and businesses invest less, whilst also weakening employment and wage demands.
So people suffer the energy price increase and are then deliberately subjected to additional financial pressure because the energy price increase has caused inflation.
That is the madness. It is madness.
‘Know someone who has met and talked to Jenrick as an MP.
She said he was surprisingly well read/informed and knew about most things she wished to discuss in detail. The only way you can add up that with what she sees publicly is to realise that he has made a choice to be where he is for some reason and talk the nonsense and poison that he talks. His agenda is himself, and he seems to have decided on a particular path to political power (far right).
One would hope that he has made the wrong choice. As to whether that is true or not is in the balance, for sure.
Might basic questions on this matter include?
“Where, on a spectrum between making life better for all our citizens and their children, and using politics to exploit regular citizens and their children, do our recent governments and the current one come”?
“To what extent do/have wealthy oligarchs, especially political donors. use/used the current political structures and politicians to exploit regular citizens and their children”?
[Both from the attached article]
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/08/17/israeli-lie-bots-the-politics-of-climate-change-and-centrists-elected-donald-trump-twice/
I doubt that Jenrick has any first hand experience of the “structure, purpose and social contact” of the type to be found working in an Amazon warehouse. People like him seem to have an idealised view of the psychological benefits of work based on their personal experience of a professional career.
Agreed
We are seeing numerous believable reports of young adults with degrees and good qualifications applying for hundreds of jobs and despairing. If this is the case how an earth does a less qualified person with mental health issues stand a chance? Most employers do not want someone who might periodically be off off sick or perform less well and see them as a liability.
If Jenrick is serious about getting people back to work he needs to invest in decent mental health services and back to work courses. These were run very successfully in the 80s and 90s. I had a friend who ran an IT training course and enjoyed working with those who had mental health difficulties so much he retrained as a social worker and specialised in mental health. I believe these courses had good success rates when tied in with the jobs required locally.
My feeling is though that they are much more interested in demonising the sick and disabled and creating narrative that it is an active life choice of those who don’t want to work. In reality a large proportion on PIP and Universal Credit do work and of those that don’t, many would like to but can’t find a suitable job.
I suspect Jenrick and his right wing friends are quite happy with a high rate of unemployment, as this means the labour market is easier to manipulate by the owners of capital. They just don’t want to pay decent support to the unemployed, just enough to keep them alive, and stop them rioting. Blaming the unemployed is a useful, and historically successful way of deflecting public opinion away from the real agenda. There’s nothing new to see here. Just how neoliberal capitalism works.
Where are the jobs is a very good question. Jenrick, like many politicians when it comes to work, is out of touch with reality on so many levels.
I feel that Reform’s answer is a simplistic one — one that the far-right, and those that support and vote for it, have been peddling for a long time. Send all the foreigners back, and there will be plenty of jobs. It assumes that British people could do those jobs. That they have the qualifications, skills, and ability. Most likely they don’t. Care work is a good example. They could probably do the low paid, unskilled jobs, but most don’t want to, and they don’t pay enough. Essentially, Reform would create a forced labour system, with a threat of no benefits if you don’t accept any job offered.
And it is clear that Reform don’t care about those with health issues, whether physical or mental health. There attitude is “pull yourself together.”
It also ignores the unknown of AI. Even Musk talks about the need for a universal basic income as jobs won’t be there in the future. UBI sounds like benefits to many politicians. Something for nothing. I cannot imagine it being introduced in the UK given how for the last fifty years or so, anyone on benefits has been presented as a scrounger or workshy (but not Reform supporting pensioners!). Our blame culture politics is not ready for AI, advanced robotics, humanoids and everything the future might throw at us on the job front.
Who is going to train those taking these jobs made vacant by forced expulsions, then, when those being made to leave take the skills with them?
A question – if say £50 billion was taken out of the economy, apart from the impact on claimants what would be the effect on local economies? And what about the multiplier effect. This money is mostly spent not saved.
There would be a recession
Spot on.
Of course another angle to this is that the PIP review by Timms is due soon and – while it is claimed has been produced in collaboration with disabled people – my understanding is that that is a bit of stretch to say that, based on my understanding. The outcome had already been planned and the discussion, has been skewered a certain pathway.
Again, there was a claim in a paper this morning people on PIP don’t want money but would prefer therapies. Yeah right. Therapies may well help on some level, but they won’t pay for new wheelchairs, medical aids, rent for stair lifts etc.
Of course, Timms review may not seen as bad a Jenricks brutusl ideas, so some may think Labour aren’t so bad after all…
Even though there is always some truth in these plans; getting people solid, stable employment, That soon gets forgotten when the crunch comes. But the financial support will definitely be gone and then what?
“My feeling is though that they are much more interested in demonising the sick and disabled and creating narrative that it is an active life choice of those who don’t want to work. In reality a large proportion on PIP and Universal Credit do work and of those that don’t, many would like to but can’t find a suitable job.”
We’ve seen this before, haven’t we? Back in the 80’s, when industry was decimated, the Manchester Evening News had literally 3 jobs advertised and the university milk-round was offering (from memory), 20,000 jobs, 19,998 of them in the armed forces. We unemployed were told, ‘get on yer bike’ and go abroad for work.
I was lucky, council rents were low (‘cos nobody wanted to live in Hulme), and local authorities generous with schemes to help. Spain joined the Common Market. And when the upturn came there were interesting jobs available in new technology.
Young people don’t have any of that nowadays.
But what makes me really angry is that they could. If politicians were willing to wield the power they have on behalf of the people who elected them, rather than the people who paid them.
Rant over.
Loving all these new infographics, BTW.
Much to agree with and thank you, Kirsten
There are currently 712,000 unfilled job vacancies in the UK. VACS02: Vacancies by industry – Office for National Statistics. 712,000 unfilled jobs is not enough for the near 1.76 million unemployed but it’s not as simple as there are no jobs. There would seem to be a mismatch in skills, pay expectations or location in many of these.
Agreed.
But whose fault is that? Who sets the curriculum?
Dear Richard,
Thank you so much for your brilliant article
This article may interest you and your readers
“Reform councillor quits Farage’s party saying new welfare policy will have fatal consequences”
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/analysis/2026/08/19/reform-councillor-quits-2/#comment-59948
Thank you