Report

Benefitting from abroad: international lessons for reforming sickness and disability benefits

This report from UK think tank Re:State examines international lessons for reforming sickness and disability benefits.

Britain’s welfare system is failing working-age adults with a disability. It is not working for the people it supports and it is not working for those who fund it.

Britain’s extra-cost benefit takes a one-size-fits-all approach that leaves those with the greatest need without adequate support, bears no direct relationship with actual extra costs incurred, and is poor at tailoring to need. Incapacity benefits are similarly flawed, failing to effectively distinguish between those who will never be able to work versus those who may have capacity to work in the future. Coupled with almost no requirement to engage with services that might help a claimant move towards employment, this leaves millions of people parked on benefits with few prospects of ever moving off them. The result is a vast loss of human potential, soaring caseloads, and ballooning costs.

These outcomes are not inevitable, instead they are largely the result of design choices. In many aspects, Britain is an outlier in the design of its disability-related benefits system. Other countries have made different choices about how to support people with disabilities and health conditions, and are achieving notably different outcomes. This offers valuable lessons for reforming the British system.

Benefitting from abroad looks at how a selection of other countries define and assess need, deliver support, apply conditionality and incentives, and help people move towards work. It compares the choices that have shaped Britain’s system with those made elsewhere, and highlights 14 lessons from the experiences of its international comparators.