The Prime Minister has delayed the conclusion of Alan Milburn’s review into the nearly one million young people not in work or training until after the Budget. Another can kicked down the road, but perhaps an accidentally wise move given the revelations made by the Centre for Social Justice’s Welfare 2030 inquiry this week.
What began as an investigation into the benefits system has become a damning diagnosis of Britain’s economic model. The CSJ has identified 3,369 neighbourhoods across England and Wales where more than half of working-age adults claim out-of-work benefits. In too many communities, economic inactivity has become entrenched across generations.
At the same time, increasingly prevalent benefits combinations are incentivising people to stay out of a tightening, low-paid jobs market.
Employers have turned overseas to fill vacancies. As British payroll employment has fallen in nine of the UK’s twelve regions since 2020, non-EU payroll employment increased in every one.
Just one in five additional payroll jobs created in Britain since 2014 went to British nationals. Astonishing.
It all points to a truth politicians have neglected for too long: they have found it easier to import labour than to invest in getting their own people into work.
The British public understood this long before alarm bells started ringing in SW1. Unfettered immigration drove the vote for Brexit.
Yet, the public were betrayed when the post-Brexit Boriswave opened the floodgates to mass, low-skilled foreign labour. This influx served as a plaster for labour shortages, and the fit-note system became a default pathway to move British people onto sickness benefits instead of recovery and purposeful work.
As a Tory MP, I saw firsthand how comfortable my colleagues became with the status quo. MPs were quick to celebrate small pots of funding to tidy high streets, while whole neighbourhoods in their constituencies were quietly being parked on the sidelines.
Labour’s Jobs Tax has made things considerably worse, increasing the cost of hiring precisely when young Brits need an escape from inactivity.
In 2025, 1.85 million foreign nationals received benefits or the state pension, 1.4 million of those were receiving working-age benefits. These figures account for people who work and pensioners who have paid their taxes. But it also includes those that haven’t made a sustained contribution, who taxpayers will be surprised to learn that their hard-earned money is subsidising.
Reform’s Shadow Chancellor, Robert Jenrick, is promising bold action to remove benefit entitlements for foreign nationals, get able-bodied long-term claimants to undertake community work, and place greater responsibility on employers to help sick workers return to employment.
A functioning welfare state must always protect those who unable to work, but it cannot be used as a permanent pacifier for those who can, neglecting the human and capital investment needed in their communities and importing entry-level workers in their place.
Britain has spent decades using welfare as an economic opiate and immigration as a substitute for investing in its own workforce.
It is time to end both dependencies.
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