Too sick to work
AROUND ONE MILLION UK HOUSEHOLDS ARE OUT OF WORK BECAUSE OF SICKNESS OR DISABILITY
Arecord number of households were out of work last year because occupants said they were too sick or disabled to have jobs.
New figures from the Office for National Statistics reveal that 3.0 million households in the UK were classed as being “workless” in 2018.
A workless adult is someone aged between 16 and 64 who is either
unemployed or can’t work because they are “economically inactive”.
That means they are unable to get a job because of family commitments, retirement, study, sickness or disability.
Nearly a third (32.7 per cent) of people in workless households in 2018 said they couldn’t work because they were sick or disabled.
A further 16.5 per cent said they did not have a job because they had taken early retirement and the same proportion said they were looking after the family or home.
Some 12.5 per cent said they were studying, while 12.3 per cent were unemployed.
The remaining 9.5 per cent did not have a job for other reasons.
This includes those waiting for the results of a job application, those who believed no jobs were available, those who said they didn’t need one and those who’d not started looking.
The proportion of people citing their sickness or disability as the reason for not being in work was the highest on modern record.
Figures go back as far as 2006 when 30.5 per cent of workless households said their sickness or disability meant they couldn’t work.
The figure began to fall in 2009 and generally trended downwards until 2013.
It has risen in each successive year since then.
One possible reason to explain the rise could be because in recent years the government has intensified efforts to reduce UK unemployment.
The proportion out households out of work because of this reason is at the lowest level on modern record.
It is therefore likely that those who cannot work because of sickness or disability now account for a larger proportion of workless households.
Wales had a higher proportion of people saying they were out of work because of sickness or disability than anywhere else in the UK (38.4 per cent). In Scotland it was 34.6 per cent, in Northern Ireland it was 35.0 per cent and in England it was 32.0 per cent.