Notes on Panorama - 'Britain on the Sick'

The programme gave a reasonable overview of the government's new approach to dealing with IB customers, focusing on claimants in Merthyr Tydfil. However, the issues raised were not covered in depth and most of the content would come as no surprise to people in welfare-to-work.

The choice of Merthyr had some impact on the show's findings, as the area is post-industrial with high unemployment and IB rates, and a lack of jobs.

Mansel Aylward, the former Chief Medical Adviser at the DWP and professor at Cardiff's Unum Centre for Psychosocial and Disability Research, was on hand to promote the benefits of working to occasionally sceptical claimants. He believes that up to 70% of IB claimants are capable of working, but that dependency sets in after 6-7 weeks.

The importance of making work pay was highlighted by Steve Fothergill of Sheffield Hallam University, who found that, for IB claimants, about 1/3 of men and 1/6 of women would not take a job earning below £20,000 as they believed they would be worse off than if they remained on benefits. He also noted that, to meet government targets, 3,000 IB claimants in Merthyr would have to find work, which raised the issue of whether there were enough local jobs for them in any case!

A local GP was interviewed, and said that his attitude to sick notes and work had changed in recent years, but that he was still concerned about the effect of disagreeing with customers over their fitness to work.

Pathways to Work and a local predecessor provided the support for the customers shown. The claimants that the show focused on showed the importance of in work benefit calculations in moving them toward employment, along with good childcare support to reassure parents who may never have been away from their children. A guaranteed interview and money for proper interview clothes also played a part in securing a job for one of the customers. Her husband, also on IB, had been on a security course, but ended up taking a job as an Asda delivery driver as the wait for the SIA licence was so long.

The show also raised the lack of impact that Pathways has had so far with claimants that have mental health problems. Stephen Timms argued that current delivery now took account of mental health issues and that the results would become evident with more time, but no solutions were discussed. He also claimed that the reduction in IB rates did not mean that JSA rates would have to increase, although this seems somewhat at odds with the modelling of inflows for flexible New Deal.

Areas that the programme didn't cover included:

• Detailed number crunching
• Solutions for people with mental health conditions, or for that matter physical or learning disabilities
• Making skills training meet the needs of employers
• Contracting of services to providers
• What to do for people who flunk the better off in work calculations
• Unum Provident