You cannot destroy jobs and demand more people work

Richard Murphy names the contradiction in UK employment policy: suppress jobs, then blame the people who can't find them. I've lived both ends of this one.

Richard Murphy put it in one sentence in July: you cannot destroy jobs and demand that more people work at the same time.

He was writing about Labour’s employment policy. The Bank of England, he says, is keeping interest rates high and taking money back out of the economy through what’s called quantitative tightening. That holds back investment and means fewer jobs. At the same time, ministers are putting more pressure on people claiming health and disability benefits to find work. Both are happening at once, and they can’t both make sense.

The contradiction has a history

Three months earlier, in April, Tony Blair’s institute proposed treating anxiety, depression, ADHD and related neurodevelopmental conditions as “non-work-limiting”, with claimants assumed fit for work by default. Murphy went through the report and found not a single reference to medical evidence. A policy about health, with no medical evidence behind it.

The number of people out of work with poor health is a real concern, and I’m not dismissing it. But look at what the report does with it. By the institute’s own count, around a thousand people a day are moving onto health-related benefits. The report doesn’t ask why. It asks how to redefine them so they stop counting.

We already have the figures that answer why. Healthy life expectancy in the UK has fallen by around two years in a decade. The ONS puts it at 60.7 years for men and 60.9 for women, while the state pension age is heading for 67. In Richmond upon Thames, men can expect over 69 years in good health. In Blackpool, it’s under 51. You don’t get a gap of nearly twenty years from people making different personal choices.

Work is not the escape route it’s claimed to be

The standard answer is that work is the way out. Prem Sikka’s analysis in July shows why that answer keeps failing. Workers’ share of what the economy produces was over 70% in 1975. By 2025 it was 59%. Real pay only got back to its 2008 level in 2024. Almost a third of people on universal credit are already in work. Over four million jobs pay less than the real Living Wage.

So the policy tells people to take work. The work on offer doesn’t pay enough to live on. And the conditions of that work are part of what’s making people unwell in the first place. Sikka calls poverty part of a social violence that exhausts people and removes hope. I hear the same exhaustion and hopelessness on our courses, from people who are in work.

The demand is always made of the person. The cause sits in the policy.

I’m not writing this from the outside

Benefits have been part of my income for most of my life, because of my health. Only when I’ve been entirely out of work have I relied on them completely. The rest of the time they’ve topped up what I could earn, which hardly ever comes up when people talk about benefits. That top-up gives me a steady income my health can’t give me on its own.

That matters, because “benefit recipient” has been made to mean “not working”. Media coverage runs that way, and government does little to correct it. Almost a third of people on universal credit are in work, and I’ve spent much of my life in that third. I also get Adult Disability Payment, which has nothing to do with whether you work at all. It exists because living with health problems costs more.

The top-up is the system admitting that when your health changes from week to week, you can’t promise the same hours every week. My long spells out of paid work were never spells out of volunteering, because volunteering gave me the flexibility employment wouldn’t. It’s why I work for myself now. The system already knows all this, because the top-up is built into it. And still the politicians talk as if the problem is effort.

I’ve dealt with the DWP for more than thirty years, through one policy change after another. What I’ve seen is rigid systems that work for no one. Not for claimants, who can’t make fluctuating health fit fixed rules. Not for employers, who lose people the rules won’t let them keep on flexible terms. Not even for the Treasury, which pays every time someone falls out of work and has to claim again.

I also teach mental health first aid, so I see the workplace side too, and it’s the same story. People come to our courses stressed and anxious because of insecure contracts, unpredictable hours and pay that doesn’t stretch. Then their employers ask them to be more resilient, as if the contracts, the hours and the pay just happened by themselves.

It’s the same contradiction on a smaller scale. You can’t make someone’s job insecure and then ask them not to feel it.

Work adjusted to people, not people adjusted to work

In his piece on the Blair report, Murphy wrote a line I’d pin above every HR strategy document: what’s needed is work adjusted to the needs of people, not people adjusted to the needs of work. A government can choose that. So can a workplace, without waiting for permission. Notice what your people are carrying before you hand them a self-care checklist and a target.

The question Murphy keeps asking is whether anyone deciding these things is willing to admit we need a politics of care. The evidence says we do. The policy says we’d rather not.

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