BRITAIN has developed a dangerous new habit: medicalising hardship. Stress, anxiety and periods of uncertainty, once understood as part of ordinary life, are increasingly being treated as permanent disabilities that justify a lifetime outside the workforce.
The result is a welfare system that has become a holding pen for a growing number of young, able-bodied people who have been encouraged to see themselves as permanently unfit for employment.
The numbers should alarm anyone who cares about the country’s economic future. Nearly a million young people in Britain are now classified as NEETs: Not in Education, Employment or Training. That represents roughly one in eight people aged 16-24.
This problem is particularly acute among graduates. The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) says 400,000 graduates are not in work and claiming Universal Credit. There are 240,000 graduates who say they cannot work due to health reasons, the think tank said, with that figure having more than doubled since 2019. Roughly half of the recent increase linked to mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression.
Of course, some have serious mental health problems and they should be supported. However, are we witnessing a genuine epidemic of incapacity, or the unintended consequences of a system that increasingly rewards withdrawal from work?
Graduates should be individuals in the prime of their lives, with degrees in hand and decades of potential productivity ahead of them, yet they are being ushered into a system designed for those permanently unable to work. This is not compassion. It is institutionalised pessimism.
Even the government seems to recognise the problem, though it appears incapable of fixing it. Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden has repeatedly warned that the current system is ‘unhealthy’, creating a rigid divide between those deemed fit for work and those essentially written off by the state.
He has argued that Britain needs a better response to anxiety and other mental health challenges than simply placing people on benefits indefinitely.
Yet when ministers attempted serious reform of the ballooning welfare bill, they ran straight into a wall of political resistance. Plans to cut billions from disability benefits collapsed after a back-bench rebellion, leaving the government retreating from its own proposals.
The result is a strange political stalemate. Everyone sane acknowledges the system is broken. Almost no one is willing to change it. Meanwhile the numbers continue to rise.
The tragedy is that this approach harms the very people it claims to protect. Work is not merely a source of income: it provides routine, purpose, social contact and dignity. Removing young people from the workforce during their formative years risks trapping them in long-term dependency that becomes ever harder to escape.
At the same time, the economic consequences are staggering. Astonishingly, our welfare bill is projected to rise to £407billion by the 2030/31 financial year from around £314billion in 2024/25. It’s unsustainable.
A welfare state should function as a safety net, something that catches people when they fall and helps them get back on their feet. What it must never become is a destination in its own right.
But when nearly a million young people are neither working nor studying, and increasing numbers are told they are too ill to try, we have to ask an uncomfortable question: is the system still helping people – or is it quietly writing them off?
