UK Special Coverage Can Burnham Tackle Entitlements? The prime minister must make hard decisions to stop Britain’s fiscal spiral. UK Special Coverage Photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth – WPA Pool/Getty Images Andy Burnham, Britain’s new prime minister, has set a blistering pace in his first full week in office. From 10 Downing Street has come a torrent of dramatic announcements about the future of the country (indeed, it resembles nothing so much as the spate of executive orders from the Trump White House in early 2025). Burnham says he will honor the UK’s commitments on defense by spending 3 percent of GDP on the military. He tells us he will “call out” Trump on foreign policy, and promises to set up a National Care Service to halt the “collapse of the NHS.” He proclaims his intent to reopen the North Sea to (some) oil and gas development, and pledges to give local authorities broader legislative and tax powers. Critics say that this is all talk. But British voters seem to like his energetic approach. Labour is now leading in some opinion polls for the first time in two years. A recent survey shows Labour up four points (to 28 percent of the electorate), while the right-wing Reform and left-wing Green parties have registered corresponding drops (to 24 percent and 8 percent, respectively). Other polls have Reform—which spent much of this summer at the top of the polls—even with Labour. And Reform could face further reversal in the contest for Andy Burnham’s vacated Greater Manchester mayoralty, which, thanks to the “Burnham Bounce,” is expected to go for Labour over Nigel Farage’s insurgent alternative. But there is one standout promise Burnham has made that may both test his command of public opinion and lead his party to ruin: his promise last week to cut the UK welfare bill. This has been rising inexorably, and now costs British taxpayers well over £300 billion annually: a sum equal to the total revenues raised by Britain’s income tax.  Disability benefits in particular have been skyrocketing, and are expected to amount to around £100 billion by 2030. A disturbing feature of the “benefits culture” is the rise in the number of young people who are falling out of the labor market altogether because of mental health problems (or neurodiversity, as it is now called). A million young people are languishing as so-called “NEETs,” which stands for “not in education, employment or training.” And around half of these are having work requirements waived for things like anxiety, depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or autism spectrum disorders. Many of these conditions barely existed 20 years ago, and conservative politicians and think tanks like the Policy Exchange suspect many young people (and adults) are simply aping the symptoms of mental illness to avoid facing up to the challenge of working for a living. Since Covid, it has become vastly easier to claim benefits for these conditions. In many cases young people can sign on and receive benefits without even a face-to-face interview.  There are websites and social media influencers (“sickfluencers”) who advise on how to present symptoms to get the best benefits. According to the Centre for Social Justice, it is now possible to acquire a suite of benefits that is not only higher than the minimum wage, but equal to or greater than the UK’s average wage. Burnham seems to agree that the system is broken. The PM says he is “not squeamish” about cutting the welfare bill. He is considering making young people do voluntary work or training as a condition of receiving benefits. Such schemes operate in the Netherlands and Germany, where governments have been more successful in getting youths into jobs than in Britain. A forthcoming report from former Labour Health Secretary Alan Milburn is expected to give some support to the PM’s view that not enough is being done to get young people out of their bedrooms and into offices. Milburn says that the state has given these young people “an income but not a way out of the benefits trap”. But getting people off benefits and into productive jobs is a tall order for a left-wing politician. Many of these young NEETs will have had their conditions certified by a doctor or health professional. To challenge these diagnoses is to challenge an entire culture of entitlement (amply documented in Suzanne O’Sullivan’s excellent The Age of Diagnosis, which shows how our obsession with labels turns mundane problems into medical issues). Milburn agrees to some extent, though he insists that very few young people are actually “lazy.” Many really want to work. Yet mental health conditions like depression and autism are not hard to simulate, and there are undoubtedly some diagnoses that are bogus. But forcing a neurodivergent person into the world of work before they are able to cope could lead to breakdown, self-harm, or even suicide. However, the “King of the North” claims to have partially addressed this problem in Manchester by rejiggering education and eliminating the sense of existential failure experienced by many working-class youngsters. His Greater Manchester Baccalaureate program aimed to accord vocational and technical subjects the same status in school as more university-oriented subjects. And Burnham now wants the entire UK education system to “value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap.” From 2028, 14-year-olds will be able to choose a technical career and acquire work experience with local firms in everything from AI to plumbing, instead of being automatically propelled toward university. This will be welcomed by many employers who lament the limited real-world skillsets of school-leavers, but it will not address the problems of overdiagnosis and is unlikely to reduce the welfare bill. Indeed, placing NEETs in voluntary jobs or training would actually cost money, as would tightening up the monitoring of their conditions and ending the “fit-note culture” by rigorous face-to-face interviews.  To reduce welfare will mean cutting entitlements, and that will involve some people with recognized medical conditions having their benefits trimmed or taken away. Burnham’s predecessor, Sir Keir Starmer, attempted to reduce expenditure on non-means-tested Personal Independence Payments (PIP), which help 4 million people with neurodivergent disabilities manage their lives. That led to a Labour backbench rebellion which forced Starmer to retreat. It was revealed in June that Pat McFadden, the Work and Pensions Secretary, had said in a private WhatsApp chat that many Labour MPs seemed interested only in “who we can tax in order to pay benefits to others.” He later insisted this was not a statement of policy, just an expression of momentary frustration. But it was revealing nevertheless. And it underscores just how hard it will be for “dynamic Andy” to turn welfare into work. The post Can Burnham Tackle Entitlements? appeared first on The American Conservative.