Quietly, without even a press release let alone a fanfare, Britain over the past 12 months has just passed a grim milestone. The number of people on out of work benefits has surpassed the peak reached in the early 1990s. Indeed, it is higher now than it was at the peak of Covid-19 in 2020.

There are now 6.5 million people living on out of work benefits

Remember when unemployment of three million used to generate headlines every week, in the early 1980s and then again a decade later? Well, there are now 6.5 million people living on out of work benefits. Yet it hardly causes a ripple in the political pond because most of them are not officially ‘unemployed’ – they are either on disability benefits or on Universal Credit, many of them without any requirement to look for work.

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