To think there will be many more disabled adults in 20 years?

Thank you - that's both interesting and informative! I can see how it might well work.

Easily. Over 25% of people claiming state pension welfare are millionaires. Over 50% have a higher income that the average UK full time salary. We need to adopt an Australian-style pension system and means-test the state pension. This will save £70-80bn in the current tax year and far more in future, if it is means tested to be taped away even at the generous level for a “moderate” retirement as set out in the PLSA retirement livings standards: this is currently £31,700 for a single adult after tax and housing costs and £43,900 for a couple. This measure, therefore, would leave absolutely nobody in poverty.

Auto-enrolment needs to become mandatory (no opt out) with gradually rising minimum contribution levels from both employees and employers until a situation is created where everybody who isn’t severely disabled is providing for their own retirement and saving is not optional. Even at current contribution levels, if someone worked in a minimum wage from 18-68 and contributed the minimum 3% employee contribution and their employer contributed the minimum 5%, if this was invested sensibly even in a simple global equity tracker fund then this market tracker generates average growth of 8% (based on the last 70 years) which would result in a pension pot of roughly £1.5m in nominal terms by the age of 68 which by then in real-terms (i.e. factoring in inflation) is likely to equate to circa £300k per person (assuming this person never progresses beyond minimum wage at all and that minimum wage rises with inflation - since it was introduced it has risen far more quickly than inflation). A similar, mandatory scheme needs to be put in place for the self-employed unless they can demonstrate sufficient existing assets already to self-fund retirement. There is absolutely no reason that the majority of people’s retirements should be funded as a welfare expense and this isn’t sustainable with an ageing population, as Australia and others realised several decades ago when they reformed their systems.

We then need to completely change our healthcare model to be one of the combined models successfully used elsewhere in Europe and in places like Australia and Canada which have far better health outcomes for comparable (or in some cases, lower) costs per person. This will ensure that people have timely treatment which will save a great deal of money in unnecessary welfare, lost tax revenue, housing support, etc.

For social care, for younger workers we should add a further 1% salary mandatory contribution throughout working life to be saved into a separate fund and invested for each employee which would be a starting point towards ensuring people save for their care costs. This percentage could be gradually increased. At retirement age the fund can be used to buy an insurance policy to cover any care needs therefore spreading the risk/ cost but without inefficient state care/ lack of choice of providers leading to poor care/ private payers subsidising those who pay nothing. Of course, like with pensions, there will always be some people born so severely disabled that they can never work and there should be state funding for them but not for everyone else who can work and save for this over a lifetime. For those already retired who - as I’ve pointed out repeatedly - as a cohort have paid far too little tax to fund their lifetime costs to the state, the pensioner exemption from national insurance should be removed immediately and that money should go into a central fund to cover the care costs for their entire cohort.

That would be a good start. Obviously there are far, far more things to do related to the other economic issues I have highlighted but none of this is rocket science, we don’t need to invent new systems; we can simply look around the world at functional systems that are already in place in other countries and far superior to our own in terms of cost efficiency, fairness and outcomes, and emulate them. But the above would be a good start, to free up tens of billions of pounds per year. Just means-testing the state pension so that we aren’t handing out £80bn per year in unnecessary welfare to those who are more than capable of supporting themselves and far better off than most households of working age (who also have childcare and rent/ mortgages to pay whereas most retirees do not as they have mostly either have paid off their mortgages or get housing benefit to cover their rent!) would enable us to double the education budget, invest in defence and infrastructure, and start to finally improve things for younger and future generations.

Of course it's a value judgement - disability benefits are only very high if you're very severely disabled and qualify for all components which most people don't. Or if you have a condition that wins you a high number of points in the various tests but doesn't actually have significant costs associated with it so the money that's meant for extra costs can be spent on luxuries. Most disabled people do have high costs though which wipe out any extra amount and those who don't qualify for Universal Credit (and it's around a third from what I understand) get far less than minimum wage to begin with - I know of people getting £6,000 a year to cover everything, including housing costs. Their partners are expected to subsidise them but many are not earning enough for a decent quality of life. This is why your average disabled person is more likely to be in poverty than the average able bodied person. Those who do get UC but have kids are often denied PIP on the basis of the kids so won't get the full whack either. If you're disabled and getting a very generous amount you have to realise that not everybody is as lucky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_(robot)

In case anyone has missed it.

You might want to ask why people like Elon Musk are advising their kids to qualify in hands on trades then, at least in the short term, and also have a gander at his contract for huge numbers of humanoid robots to be completed by 2030.

And if your post is satirical, fair play.

If not, meditation might take the edge off.

This is the first generation brought up with phones and social media. They’ve also had Covid to deal with.

I agree their MH is awful and they’ll never have normal healthy lives.

So sad.

Of course it's already taking jobs - this has been widely reported by reputable news sources such as the BBC and Channel 4 as well as by the government itself via departments such as the ONS (Office for National Statistics). This is only going to accelerate over the coming years.

Absolute nonsense! Stop watching Netflix documentaries and YouTube tripe! AI can barely write a letter without making mistakes it's not taking jobs anytime soon and this sort of fantasy thinking is why the country is in a mess!

Also a large number of disabled claimants are gaming the system we have threads on here daily proving it and if employers have a bad impression of them that's their fault not mine as a taxpayer.

The country is broke and something has to be done like or not we cannot continue as we are!

I wonder about this myself. A far greater proportion of the population may be in need of welfare in the coming decades and many will be the "strivers" of today - people who worked hard and achieved academically and consequently expected a lifetime of decent earnings, only to find out that they too will be expected to live on £400 a month and called scroungers for the privilege. It's very hard to see how it's all going to play out and I hope we don't see this outcome but mass unemployment, even of those with great ability and skill is obviously far from unlikely.

But how do we spend less on the elderly @29000seconds ? We've already forced those with savings to pay for their own care home fees which are astronomical and wipe people out financially in many cases. We can't deny them healthcare on account of their age and it seems just as unethical to means test the state pension, meaning some are penalised for having been prudent over the years, creating disincentives for future generations to save.

This may be overthinking things a little but could the current uptick in anti welfare rhetoric be a bit of a "slight of hand" by business and government who know over the next two/three decades a lot of jobs will be replaced by AI and that it will take a while for new jobs to appear and for people to train for them?

Can't help feeling that it's awfully easy and convenient to rile up low income and middle class taxpayers to support removing and restricting welfare so that when those job losses do come the government doesn't have to put it's hand in its pocket to support them and ironically it got the people who ended up needing it to do all the work for them and can simply say "you voted for it" and hide behind "democracy".

Sorry that's a little too conspiratorial and I don't think it's entirely the case but I'm pretty sure a tiny grain of truth does exist in the above.

It also feels ass backwards that the message around disabled claimants always centers around the idea they are feckless workshy liars gaming the system which is hardly the impression you want to give to employers if you want these people working. I'm pretty sure dishonest and lazy are not qualities employers are looking for...

No I don't have any grand solution before someone asks I'm just a low level office worker trying to get by but I can't shake the feeling we're being played.

And in light of this, anybody who is surprised that claims for disability are rising (given the substandard medical care, lack of preventative treatment, and huge delays for any kind of treatment at all) is rather hard of thinking.

The obvious solution is to raise growth so that we have a growing “cake” and people can contribute more tax without their living standards falling further, increasing social division while society and infrastructure crumbles. Fighting over the remaining mouldy cake crumbs and trying to divide them into portions will not solve anything.

The only way to raise growth and therefore raise living standards sustainbly rather than “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, the only way to increase tax revenue and funding for necessary services without strangling the economy further and creating the opposite effect, is to raise productivity.

The only way to raise productivity is by ensuring that a sufficient proportion of public expenditure is spent on productive parts of the economy that will generate increased future revenue - i.e. a huge investment in education, plus much more spending on infrastructure, a proper industrial strategy developing the high-productivity areas where the UK has knowledge bases and strategic advantages such as engineering, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, finance, the arts etc. - and to rebalance the tax system to remove the cliff edges that create perverse disincentives to work at multiple levels of earnings (significantly lower the universal credit taper rate, make child benefit universal again, make the personal allowance universal again, make childcare funding universal again, levy tax on a household unit basis like pretty much every other developed country rather than the absurd and distorted system that we have now: robust economic studies show that these measures would actually increase tax revenue by removing the perverse disincentives that currently exist). Oh, and not obstructing trade with the largest trading block right on our doorstep.

This is all blatantly obvious to anybody with a sub-GCSE level grasp of economics, yet isn’t being done, and we appear to have a large part of the electorate who claim they are unhappy with their declining living standards yet continue to deny the very obvious reasons that this is happening and continually vote for politicians who produce manifestos setting out policies which will accelerate the decline and instead want to sit there getting poorer every year while raging against disabled people/ immigrants/ children with autism or ADHD/ <insert other economically illiterate and nasty hobbyhorse of your choice> when even if all of these people disappeared when the sun rose tomorrow their own prospects and living standards wouldn’t rise. The irony is that in fact they would likely fall.

I suppose there is some truth in the saying that people get the Government they deserve. It’s just sad that these UK voters, of which there are a depressingly high proportion, are dragging the rest of us down with them. Our only hope is that they stop before we all drown but it’s not looking likely based on political polling and the idiotic comments on this thread and many other like it.

So yes, @Northermcharn (ironic username) I do keep saying the same thing. That’s because that “thing” is what is clearly evidenced by indisputable data from many countries over decades, which some people seems determined to ignore, for reasons unfathomable to me as somebody rational.

Wrong again.

The chart below displays the Health Care Index scores for 2025 across major OECD countries, which measure healthcare quality, infrastructure, and availability.

Oh dear you just keep saying the same thing again and again. Obviously there are reasons why the benefits bill is too big and growing, no one is saying it's the only issue. But I'll stop discussing it with you because you're clearly myopic on the issue.

Before I go - surprisingly (not surprisingly) your claim that the UK has 'one of the worst health care systems of any developed country', is incorrect. In fact the UK was recently ranked 4th out of 11 'developed countries' health care systems. Used to be first of course, but what with the over population the NHS is suffering. At least 10-15 million immigrants in 20 years - has an effect.

I guess some of the problem is that’s too onerous to make your own success.
I see ND kids that have great skills but the it’s so difficult to make these into a workable venture due to all the rules and legislation. The easy start ups in the 80’s and 90’s have gone.

Theres no easy way to get tax/ start up help these days. We used to have banks and careers help centres even my small town if you wanted to set up something. It’s incredibly hard to get through realms of contradicty info online l

Many people with disabilities would be able to work if employers were more reasonable. Clearly you can't do a driving job if you are medically unable to drive, but you can work in an office. And if you have a condition which means you can't travel to an office, you can work at home.

Of course, there aren't enough jobs full stop currently. Although it does make you wonder why we have so many immigrants if we don't have the jobs. OK British people might not want to work as carers (I wouldn't) but do we really need immigrants to do things like (wo)man the barriers at railway stations or be postpeople when we have so many youngsters looking for a job?

If you ask people to "volunteer" to do something and pay them to do it, isn't that a paid job?

The unsustainable increase in welfare has been driven by:

1. the exponential rise in state pension welfare which is already on its own (not even including pension credit and housing benefit and attendance allowance and the enormous social care expense) approaching 50% of the total welfare budget. I don’t think many people understand maths: not only do we have an ageing population and below-replacement birth rate but the triple lock - even with a stable age demographic - means that it is a mathematical certainty that the state pension expense will eventually exceed the TOTAL amount of tax revenue collected in the UK unless it is rescinded, and yet there are still people who support this measure remaining in place. It is literally mathematically impossible for it to continue forever without bankrupting the country.

2. Rising retirement ages meaning that the age cohort with the largest increase in disability benefit claims are those who are in their 50s and 60s and have developed health issues but haven’t saved enough money to retire so are making disability welfare claims until they reach the age where they will receive state pension welfare instead;

3. The expected rise in ill health given the global pandemic and the fact that the UK has one of the worst healthcare systems of any developed country with some of the very poorest care and medical outcomes for patients.

The rise in the welfare expense is primarily because of the disproportionate amount of spending on pensioners and the fact that even those who have far more income than the average UK full time salary still think they are “entitled” to welfare they do not need and didn’t - as a cohort - pay anywhere near enough tax to fund. The rising welfare cost is a symptom (not the cause) of the other economic problems that I identified in my earlier posts. We need to address the causes if we want rising living standards. Blaming disabled people/ cutting disability benefits further would just cause higher taxpayer costs later (justice, health, housing, lost productivity and tax revenue, etc).

I think these kinds of threads show very clearly why economics should be part of the national curriculum. It’s depressing how few adults seem to have a grasp of even the most basic and fundamental principles of economics and make all kinds of assertions without even having looked at the data and seem incapable of understanding the relative magnitude of various different public expenses even when this is pointed out to them, often trying instead to extrapolate their personal experiences or opinions or prejudices to the country as a whole as if this is a substitute for statistically validated data and comparison to statistically validated data from other countries (i.e. actual evidence).

It's either simply ignorant or it is wilfully ignorant to assert that the benefits bill - including disability benefits which are a huge part, isn't a major problem.

As the TBI states 'the UK benefits bill is widely considered a major fiscal problem in 2026, projected to exceed £400 billion annually by the end of the decade. Total welfare spending has surpassed income tax revenue and exceeds the budget for health, education, or defence. Rising sickness benefits, with 8.4 million people receiving payments, are driving this "unsustainable" increase.'

Yes, it does.

A good first step would be implementing a state pensions system like that in Australia.

And a healthcare system similar to that in France.

Then we’ll have the money we need for education, defence, infrastructure etc and productivity and living standards will have a hope of rising rather than falling for the first time in over two decades.

Disabilities/ disability benefits are a distraction, a red herring, an imaginary squirrel that is fairly irrelevant to the problem and - while far from a perfect system of course - obsessing about this does not will not do anything if significance to improve the economic prospects of the UK or provide a route to rising living standards or prosperity. The issues that need to be addressed are crystal clear. It’s a shame we have no political party willing or capable of even discussing the obvious solutions let alone implementing them, and an electorate so ill-informed that it doesn’t demand a Government who will do so.

Like I said (in addition to the obvious impact of geopolitical factors which are impacting most countries, but instead looking at the factors driving UK-specific economic problems over and above the effects or the international issues beyond UK control) the effect of disability benefits on the UK economy/ tax revenue is insignificant compared to the impact of Brexit; decades of economic mismanagement; our crumbling infrastructure; our dysfunctional tax system which is strangling any prospect of productivity and growth; our failed healthcare, education and pensions systems; and the fact that 50% of public spending is now going on retirees who are the wealthiest cohort in society but only 15% of the population which is clearly unsustainable, hence falling living standards for everyone else. Disability benefits are a minor issue and certainly not even in the top 10 causes of our economic problems in the UK.

It’s a tiresome distraction/ obsession with some people and demonstrates either a lack of economic knowledge or a desperate attempt to try to deflect blame and find vulnerable scapegoats. If ALL disability benefits miraculously were not required anymore overnight it would make barely any difference at all to the UK’s economic situation or growth projections. The small rise in recent years (unsurprising following a global pandemic and with failing education and healthcare systems) is a rounding error in comparison to the multiple structural problems with the UK economy as outlined above which are the drivers of low growth, poor productivity, and the resulting ongoing decline in GDP per capita (when it is still rising in what used to be our comparator countries).

This will not change until education, healthcare, pensions, social care, our industrial policy and tax system are fundamentally reformed in the ways I have outlined to redirect a significant proportion of public spending towards investment in infrastructure and education etc, which will raise productivity. Until and unless that happens living standards will continue to decline. It’s that simple. Economists know this because we study the real-world effects of various types of policies when implemented in various countries across the world. The data does not lie.

Well certain governments if they get it will strip people of disability benefits except for the worst conditions. So plans are afoot

Thank you

People like to tell themselves (and people who have experienced things beyond their comprehension) they'd be able to simply cope their way out of horrible crises. I'm sorry you've experienced all those awful things 💐

Something needs to be done. We can't keep kicking the can down the road for a future generation to deal with.