In 1997 the UK government was spending an annual £24 billion on sick and disabled benefits.
In 2010 it was spending an annual £24.6 billion on sick and disabled benefits.
Some 2.6m people claim incapacity benefit, or its successor, the employment and support allowance, at an annual cost of about £12.5bn.
There are now 3.16 million people receiving DLA and forecast expenditure on the benefit for 2010-11 is £12.1bn.
There was a £93 billion total welfare benefits cost in 1996-97:
Now, that has more than doubled, pretty much like everything else:
In 1998, the government claimed that £4 billion was fraudulently claimed.
In 2009, £0.9 billion was due to fraud. (Of course, the figure we're most likely to be familiar with is the £5.2 billion spun by David Cameron, which included tax credits and bureaucratic errors.)
It was a 'previous' government which introduced Incapacity Benefit as a cost-saving measure in the 1990s, yet spending on disability benefits doubled during this time:
And so we have a 'new' government introducing 'new' welfare reforms to save money, reforms which are ideologically based rather than evidence based and, ironically, likely to be at a the cost of the well-being of the people who do move off benefits, forced into low-paid and insecure jobs or sanctioned with loss of benefits if they don't.
Yet, it makes sensational headlines and presumably makes some people feel better to scapegoat people worse off than them for the nation's ills. Especially so, when every day we seem to be subjected to political rhetoric labelling benefits claimants as 'scroungers' and 'cheats' living off hard-earned handouts from the better off (after all, that's what the Welfare State is for, isn't it?), words which could equally and more fairly be used to describe those same mostly Christian and church-going politicians' expenses claims and their rich friends' tax avoidance and evasion. Who better to target than the sick and disabled who are well used to it, after all?
That sickens me more than the people who choose not to work even if they are mentally and physically able to.