Why are more people claiming disability benefits?

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Hello, and welcome to More or Less with me, Tim Harford.

As the dark days of winter recede, the team and I have emerged from our borough, hungry for facts and blinking in the light of statistical spring.

This week, is it true that the UK imprisons more people for their social media posts than Russia does?

Is the UK's housing stock the oldest in Europe?

One of the country's most important data sources has been falling apart, which seems bad.

But first, the last few days have been filled with a frenzied discussion of spending on welfare, as the government has announced a slew of changes to the system.

The area that's come under closest scrutiny is spending on health-related benefits for people of working age, and loyal listeners have asked us to dig into the figures.

Much of the discussion has centered around the rising cost of providing these benefits, and it is true that this cost has risen sharply to £48 billion last financial year from £36 billion in 2019-2020, just before the pandemic.

That is up about a third in four years, and those numbers do adjust for inflation.

There are two basic forms of working age health related benefits.

First, incapacity benefit, they're to support people with a condition that prevents them from working.

Then there's disability benefits which compensate for the cost of support or other higher living costs.

Most of this is in the form of personal independence payments or PIP.

The increase in the cost of working age health-related benefits is more or less evenly split between disability and incapacity benefits.

And the immediate cause is that more people are claiming one or both of these benefits.

In England and Wales between 2019 and 2024 disability benefits cases climbed from 2 to 2.9 million while incapacity benefit cases went from 2.1 to 3 million.

For each category that's an increase of almost a million cases.

What about the reasons for these claims?

Tom Waters is an Associate Director at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and has written a recent paper on these figures.

Disability benefits are better documented.

So the increase in the number of people getting disability benefits since the pandemic, a bit more than half of it is accounted for by mental behavioural problems, but the other half, about 45%, is accounted for by people getting it for physical reasons.

Unfortunately, we can't do the same analysis for incapacity benefits because the condition that's being claimed for isn't recorded in the data.

But now for the big question.

Why are more working age people claiming these benefits?

The truth is no one really knows.

Ah.

There's several hypotheses you might think about.

You might think that the cost of living crisis perhaps has something to do with it.

So perhaps when people's real incomes fall in the cost of living crisis, when prices go up really quickly, people who might be ineligible for these benefits before but weren't claiming them, they might look to find another way to increase their income And so they start claiming.

That might be another hypothesis.

Interesting theory.

What does the evidence say?

One thing I think is useful in thinking about this is to look at the international evidence.

So we looked at about 10 or 12, so other well-off countries and tried to collect data on their disability benefits and equivalents.

And basically, this is a UK phenomenon.

So most countries have seen no change, sometimes a small decrease, sometimes a small increase in the number of people getting these benefits since the pandemic.

Whereas in the UK, we're seeing increases, you know, on the order of, depending on what time periods you're talking about, 30%, 40% rises.

No other country has seen anything remotely like that.

Now, of course, all other countries had COVID.

All these countries would have seen really sharp increases in inflation.

And so that seems that it can't be just something just as simple as something resulting from COVID or something resulting from the cost of living crisis that's driving these numbers up.

What about other incentives?

One claim that's been doing the rounds is that a car leasing scheme called Motability might be contributing to the increase.

It's a scheme open to some recipients of disability benefits who give up part of their benefit to pay for it.

Almost one in five new cars are bought by the motability scheme and then leased out.

So in order to get the motability scheme you have to get a component of personal independence payment called the enhanced mobility component and about half of PIP claimants get the enhanced mobility component and that was about the same before the pandemic.

So what that means is the number of people who'd be eligible for motability has increased at about the same pace as the number of PIP claimants who aren't eligible for motability.

And of course, motability scheme, it was available before the pandemic, so the incentive in that sense was already there.

And so it's a little bit harder to see how that could account for the really sharp rise that we've seen lately.

It's a similar story for the theory that people might be claiming incapacity or disability benefits because they're more more generous than other benefits.

They were already more generous before the pandemic, so it can't explain the sharp rise we've seen since.

So

maybe we're just less healthy.

What evidence do we have that the health of the population is getting worse?

So it's pretty tricky.

Unfortunately, Since the pandemic, the quality of the main surveys that we rely upon has worsened quite considerably.

And so that means it's difficult to have a really consistent measure of people's health over time.

And if you look in different surveys and look at how many working-age people have a long-term health condition, you can get different answers from different surveys.

What we do see that is consistent in the surveys is that there's more people who have a mental health problem.

And we see some other external evidence for that as well.

So there's more people who are in contact with NHS mental health services since the pandemic.

That's gone up really quite rapidly.

It's a 36% increase since 2019.

That's pretty substantial.

On physical health, the evidence is more mixed.

Different surveys tell different stories.

We do have some limited evidence from data on sickness absence in the public sector.

So you can look at the number of sickness days taken in different parts of the public sector where we've got good quality administrative data on this.

For the NHS, for example, before the pandemic, it was a little bit more than 4%

of days were taken on sickness.

So any given day, about 4% of NHS staff were on a sickness absence.

That's gone up to about 5%

in the latest data.

We can see increases as well in the civil service and teachers.

But for the NHS specifically, we can actually see whether these sick days are for mental problems or for physical health problems.

And we've seen an increase in both of them at about a similar rate.

As that does provide some external evidence of a worsening in broader health issues.

We've just made a special episode of more or less about the impact of lockdowns on young people.

And one of the things that we found is that whether or not it's anything to do with lockdowns, the mental health of young people seems to have markedly deteriorated over the last few years.

That presumably would show up in an increase in young people

claiming these working age benefits.

Any evidence of that in the data?

That's right.

So for young people, there has been a faster increase in getting these benefits than for older people.

So to give you a little bit of a sense of scale, a 20 year old today is about as likely to claim one of these benefits as a 39 year old was back in 2019.

So there's been an increase across the board.

All ages become more likely to claim these benefits, but they've been faster, particularly fast for younger people.

So about six to seven percent of people in their twenties are claiming.

And most young people on disability benefits get it for mental and behavioral problems.

About three quarters of twenty year olds, for example, get it for mental and behavioural problems.

And there has been a shift towards claiming for mental problems, but that's actually been the same, pretty similar at all ages.

So even older people have become more likely to claim for mental health reasons.

Our thanks to Tom Waters from the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

You're listening to more or less.

Just a quick reminder now of our back catalogue of statistical sleuthery that is, as ever, available on BBC Sounds.

And this isn't a general plug, it's targeted advertising, specifically directed at you, Professor Sir Sam Etherington.

Sir Sam is a London GP who appeared on the Today programme earlier this week and said this.

GPs are completely overwhelmed now.

So you've got something like 30 million consultations a month in general practice, way up from pre-COVID.

That's nearly half the population of this country are going to their GPs in a month's period.

As Sir Sam would know if he had been listening in January 2024, this claim is justifiable, but very likely to be misunderstood.

While it is true that there are around 30 million appointments in GP surgeries per month, only about 45% are with GPs.

The rest are other appointments such as blood tests done by nurses.

And they are certainly not with 30 million individual people.

And as Charlotte MacDonald specifically told us all in January 2024, they are not with half the population of the UK.

These are individual appointments.

And if you're really ill, you might make lots of appointments in a month.

As Becky Baird from the King's Fund told us at the time, GP super users take up a big proportion of those appointments.

A large study did show that frequent attenders, that the top 10% of them are people going, make up about four in every 10 consultations in England.

If you, like Sir Sam, Sam, are planning to go on the Today programme, or even just to listen to it, consider subscribing to the More Or Less podcast to guard against confusion and other forms of statistical misfortune.

On the 18th of February, BBC News night's Victoria Derbyshire was left flummoxed by this claim from Carla Sands, who was the ambassador to Denmark under President Trump's first administration.

There are more people in jail in the UK because they spoke what they thought was right or they had interest online than there are in all of Russia.

Oh my goodness, I don't know where you've got that from.

Carla Sands's claim is similar to those made by the Vice President J.D.

Vance at the Munich Security Conference and by the President's right-hand man, Elon Musk, on the Joe Rogan podcast.

Several thousand people have been given prison sentences in the UK for social media posts where there was no explicit link to actual violence.

On a separate occasion, Joe Rogan claimed that there's something like 4,000 people have been arrested in England for thought crimes where they've said things online that people find to be a hateful thing or a problematic thing.

And I think it's only 200 in Russia.

If you say it enough times, it must be true, right?

Right?

Well, obviously not.

We got our policing people's thoughts, prayers, and Twitter feeds correspondent, Lizzie McNeil on the case.

Hello, Lizzie.

Hi, Tim.

Well, first things first, Carla's statement was a bit vague, wasn't it?

Yes, there are more people in jail in the UK because they spoke what they thought was right or they had interest online than there are in all of Russia.

Yeah, so I asked her what she meant and whether she had any examples or where she got her information from.

Good.

Was she helpful?

Uh she was concise.

But was she helpful?

She was concise, Tim.

Here's her email info.

Hi, Lizzie.

It's a fact, and you can research it.

Best regards, Carla Sands.

Well, it's nice to have permission.

I take it you did indeed research.

Oh yeah, I've researched the heck out of it.

The claim seems to have first started floating around in a slightly different guise on the Webisphere in December 2022 via a tweet which claimed that apparently Last year, 400 people were arrested in Russia for social media posts.

Shocking authoritarianism?

Yet 3,300 people were arrested in the UK for social media posts.

Right, so already we have different numbers and different fates, so being arrested versus being jailed, and different acts, social media posts or speaking what they thought was right or thought crimes.

It's all a bit messy.

Yeah, and I'm here to tidy up, Tim.

Never fear.

Both of these figures, the 400 in Russia and the 3,300 in the UK, refer to 2017 and are not talking about the same thing.

The UK figure referred to the number of arrests made under Section 127 of the Communications Act.

Specifically, online malicious communications.

Well, that sounds like social media posts to me.

Some of them will be.

For example, they might include tweets or Facebook posts attacking what is called a protected characteristic, such as race, religion, or sexual orientation.

And if you're a free speech fundamentalist, then maybe being arrested for a racial slur might be equated to being arrested for a fault crime.

But online malicious communications also include threats and intimidation.

Okay, so these aren't just people who spoke what they thought was right.

Can we clear up this slippage between the number of arrests and the number of people being imprisoned?

It definitely wasn't 3,300 people imprisoned.

We know that nearly 1,700 were convicted, but we don't know how many of them were imprisoned.

These types of crimes commonly receive sentences like fines, community service, restraining orders and being made to pay compensation to the victim.

People generally only receive jail sentences under the most extreme cases that are judged to have caused intentional targeting of vulnerable individuals, prolonged or repetitive behaviour, premeditation or the use of technology to avoid detection.

What about the Russian figure of 400 people?

That's also from 2017, but unlike the UK figure which was centred around arrests, this one was taken from data about criminal proceedings.

The figure comes from a report by Agora, which is a Russian human rights group and NGO.

They found that criminal proceedings were brought against 411 internet users.

So why were they being prosecuted?

For very different reasons than people in the UK, including posting online criticisms of the Russian government and promoting homosexuality.

Also, things that are nothing to do with what you say or write, but what you read.

For example, reading the BBC website or other websites banned by the Russian state, or accessing a website that discusses LGBTQ plus issues.

So not like the UK at all.

Nope.

Shockingly, it turns out Russia has way more restrictions on freedoms than the UK does.

I looked at the most recent reports by Freedom House, a non-profit organisation based in Washington, DC, that advocates for democracy, political freedom, and human rights.

Unfortunately, they didn't want to put anyone up for interview right now, but they did send me their most recent findings.

Which were.

Well, they actually rate countries' freedom scores by looking at things like government surveillance, access to the web, limitations to content, and violations of user rights.

The UK got a score of 78 out of 100, Russia got a score of 20 out of 100.

And this hits on one of the key issues with trying to compare countries like the UK to countries like Russia.

Russia operates in a clandestine way.

We do not have reliable data on election results, let alone on who they're imprisoning.

We know that children as young as seven were arrested for laying flowers at the Ukrainian embassy in Moscow.

We know that political opponents are arrested on trumped-up charges.

We know Jehovah's Witnesses have been banned from practicing their faith, and many are currently imprisoned.

But we don't know how many people have been arrested for social media posts because part of the way that Russia operates is by keeping people in the dark.

Well, thank you, Lizzy.

Can we talk about some of the more recent cases?

The statistical claim seems to refer to 2017, but I know a lot of the excitement in the US concerns people who were imprisoned after the riots in the summer of 2024.

Mostly people went to jail not for what they said or wrote, but for arson, attacking police, attacking people's houses, or trying to break into and attack migrant centres.

But there were some people who were jailed for posting things online.

Some were racist things, others were inciting violence, things like starting a Facebook group called Bring the Riots to Cardiff, and posting things like, Let's effing riot.

This was during a time when the government was trying to stop the spread of the riots by throwing the book at people who broke the law.

So it doesn't seem quite right to describe all these cases as being about saying what they thought was right or that they had interest online.

No, it doesn't, does it?

It's not clear if Carla Sands, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan and J.D.

Vance are familiar with the details of all these cases, but what they're insinuating is that people are being arrested just for what they believe in.

This is widely known as being a prisoner of conscience.

I spoke to the human rights organisation Amnesty International about this because they're the ones that originated the phrase.

They told me that people and organisations have different criteria for what counts as a prisoner of conscience, political prisoner or similar terms.

Prisoner of conscience is an amnesty term and we have a process and criteria for defining.

One of the things that we establish in this process is that someone has not used violence or advocated violence or hatred in the circumstances leading to their detention.

Which would clearly exclude those right cases.

People do not have a human right to engage in or incite racist violence, and so their imprisonment for doing so is not a matter of their conscience being violated.

Okay, so those cases maybe shouldn't count.

And I'm also guessing that when it comes to prisoners of conscience, Russia does indeed have some.

Yeah, Amnesty told me that while they didn't calculate the number of prisoners of conscience in Russia, another organisation, the Memorial Human Rights Group, counts something similar.

They found that, as of today, 437 individuals are imprisoned on political grounds, 432 on religious grounds, and an additional 586 people are politically persecuted but remain outside of prison.

So all in all, this is not a fact.

The UK does not have more people in jail than Russia because they spoke what they thought was right or had an interest online.

Thank you, Lizzy.

You did indeed research it.

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As we well know on More or Less, not all statistics are equal.

We've come across our fair share of flimsy claims spun together by PR companies using sample sizes smaller than our last team building karaoke night.

Anything by craft work, since you ask?

Yes, we spend much of our time chasing down the spurious, the flaky, and the downright wrong.

So often we breathe a sigh of relief when we turn to data from the Office for National Statistics.

ONS has often been a byword for trusted or reliable.

That's how it's meant to work.

But for nearly two years now, one of the ONS's flagship publications, the Labour Force Survey, has been in deep trouble.

This survey, which is meant to provide us with some of the most basic economic data, such as the employment rate, has been deeply unreliable.

So much so that the ONS even suspended the publication of new data for four months.

This news may not be the stuff of tabloid front pages, but for those working on economic policy, making important decisions without a reliable labour force survey feels like driving with your eyes shut.

Delphine Strauss is economics correspondent at the Financial Times, and she's been following this sorry saga since the beginning.

She remembers when the labour force survey was in better health.

So in happier times it used to be far and away the most detailed and authoritative set of data that we had on what's going on in the UK jobs market.

It's super important for the Bank of England to understand what's going on in the dynamics that drive inflation.

It's important for policymakers and central government if they want to know not just how many people are in work and out of work but also do we have good jobs?

Do we have the kind of jobs people want?

You know, are they productive?

Are they fulfilling?

Are they flexible enough?

This is not small potatoes.

This is big fat jacket potatoes with baked beans and cheese.

This data is essential for guiding the big decisions in public life, such as whether to increase interest rates or what kind of employment policies to introduce.

If If this data is useless, we are flailing around with, well, sorry to repeat myself, but with our eyes shut.

But how did we get here?

The response rate to the labour force survey has been falling very gradually for many years, more than a decade.

And that's the same with most surveys, most surveys of households in most countries.

But that was for a long time seen as a sort of, you know, building long-term problem, not an immediate crisis.

There was huge disruption at the start of COVID COVID when they had to switch from face-to-face to phone interviews.

And the ONS knew in 2020 that that was leading to some issues, that it wasn't just harder to reach people, it was also that they were getting a different mix of people answering the survey.

Fewer renters, fewer people from deprived areas, slightly different mix of nationalities and age groups.

And they tried to adjust for that and they put more interviewers into the field, especially in the areas where they weren't getting enough responses.

And things did stabilise to a certain degree.

But in the middle of 2023, the ONS made a fateful mistake.

The ONS was trying to do two things at once.

It was trying to keep the old labour force survey running, but it was also trying to develop and test and ramp up this new survey called the Transformed Labour Force Survey.

which is meant to be the ultimate answer to all of these problems of falling response rates to be done online, supposed to be quicker and easier to fill in and give you all of the detail you want.

Under pressure to cut costs, the ONS had made significant cuts to its survey's budget and was juggling resources.

And at this point, it decided to pull resources off the existing labour force survey and put them into the development of its prototype transformed labour force survey.

The effect on the existing labour force survey was

not wholly positive.

They had a very big sudden problem, and the response rates dipped a lot.

And it was in the summer of 2023, when they came to process the results from that, that they saw that they had some numbers that couldn't possibly be right.

And so that was when they realised they couldn't publish the numbers and had to sort of do a crisis management job.

So there was this crisis moment for the Labour Force Survey in the summer of 2023.

I mean, has that been fixed?

Do policymakers now trust the Labour Force survey, or is it as bad as ever?

No.

Most economists at the moment think it is more or less unusable.

I mean, unusable?

That sounds pretty bad.

So the basic top-line numbers coming from the Labour Force Survey, people who know what they're talking about, do not trust them.

That's correct.

The quality has improved since its nadir in late 2023 when the ONS had to pause publication, but perhaps this isn't saying much.

And while the top-level figures are are questionable, things are even worse when you go below that.

You might remember much discussion in the last couple of years about a crisis of economic inactivity following the pandemic, with many people in their 50s and 60s leaving the workforce.

Well, it looks like that might have been a statistical mirage created by the misfiring labour force survey.

We hit this problem ourselves.

Earlier in the week, we made a special edition of More or Less looking at the effect of the lockdown on young people.

One of the questions we wanted to answer was, what has been the long-term impact of lockdowns on young people's job prospects?

That should be a fairly straightforward question for the Labour Force Survey to answer, but it's become so unreliable that in the end, our answer was basically, we don't know.

This is Hannah Slaughter, a senior economist at the Resolution Foundation.

With the overall sample size of the Labour Force Survey falling over time, that just means it's getting more and more difficult to look at smaller groups.

So, for example, one of the groups we're particularly interested in is young people.

We know that there are rising problems with young people's mental health, and it's important to understand how that has impacted their employment.

And that just becomes more and more difficult as the overall sample decreases.

At this point, you are probably wondering what the ONS have to say about this.

So are we.

We have invited them on the programme more than once, but they've told us they have nothing more to add before their next update on the labour force survey in April.

What about the so-called transformed labour force survey, meant to replace the labour force survey?

It looks like that could be as late as 2027,

over four years since the original problems became apparent.

You're listening to more or less.

One of our loyal listeners, Colin, has heard a claim which he finds very surprising.

We've got the oldest housing stock in Europe in this country.

Having lived and worked and also holidayed in Europe, I cannot see the justification for the claim.

That's fair, Colin.

I've visited Rome too.

Some of it looks pretty ancient to me, but do go on.

The question is, what is old?

Is the word old being used in a pejorative sense?

Old houses can be better than new ones.

I hope that you can get your teeth into this question.

Well, here we are, and we're going to have a go at just that.

Does the UK have the oldest housing stock in Europe?

Yes, we do have the oldest housing stock in Europe.

Well, that settles that.

And that's really all we have time for this week.

But if you're curious to go into that item in more detail, we will return to the topic next week.

Please keep your questions and comments coming in to more or less at bbc.co.uk.

Until next week, goodbye.

More or less was presented by me, Tim Harford.

The producer was Tom Coles, with Nathan Gower, Lizzie McMeal, and Charlotte MacDonald.

The production coordinator was Brenda Brown.

The programme was mixed and recorded by James Beard, and our editor is Richard Varden.

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