All New DWP Assault Is Coming After People IN WORK!

Right, so once again it seems the DWP is launching another attack on ordinary working class people, but this might be the most insane attack yet, since it appears the harridan in charge of Work and Pensions these days, Liz Kendall is coming after people who are actually in work, because if you are in work, and this goes through, you might well better hope you never get sick.
Labour are currently conducting a supposedly independent review called Get Britain Working but part of it might better be called Keep Britain Working, because should you become ill for longer than 7 days and need to get a fit note to cover you, you might well find it a lot harder to get one going forwards and I say supposed because I’ve got questions over the suitability of the guy doing the review to be conducting it.
Kendall has revived the Tory plan to clamp down on the number of people getting fit notes under the impression it is too high, not by addressing underlying reasons for why this is – people unable to see a doctor, waiting lists for procedures or treatment, we all know the kind of issues we all face getting medical attention these days – instead it appears making it just plain harder to get a fit note and get access to sick pay is the answer. Again it seems to be all stick and no carrot from Starmer’s Labour at our expense and in favour of the bosses, again making it abundantly obvious this is no Labour Party, just another unwanted Tory Party.
Right, so the Department for Work and Pensions, the DWP, about as well liked as a week full of Monday mornings has long been accused of waging a war on disabled people, for years under the Tories and if anything even more so now under the, well still Tories frankly, but the ones claiming to be a Labour Party instead, worse if anything, making it increasingly difficult for them to access vital benefits, all dressed up as reforms, but reforms imply an improvement and for this you always have to ask improvement for who? Because it isn’t for the lives of any of those people affected by these changes, these cuts, this assault on vulnerable people. But now it seems the DWP’s terrifying boss Liz Kendall is on a mission to double down on matters, having announced the attacks coming for the long term sick and disabled, she’s now coming after those in work too. If you’re working class, there’s no pleasing this Labour government in name only, every one of us it appears is a target.
Specifically this time though, the DWP is turning its attention to another vulnerable group: workers who fall ill.
It happens all the time doesn’t it? You might come down with the flu, a stomach bug whatever, you need a few days off to deal with it and that’s fine, your sick pay kicks in after 3 days, you have to take that on the chin, but as long as you aren’t sick for more than 7 days, Kendall will deign to leave you be as things stand.
If you are sick for more than 7 days though, you might have a problem.
You see upon reaching 7 days of illness you are then required to get a fit note from your doctor and Kendall plans to reform the fit note system and by reform, it appears she plans to make it harder to get one.
Currently, you self certify for the first 7 days of sickness, but beyond that, in order to access Statutory Sick Pay, or SSP, you need a fit note from the doctor or nurse or other qualified person to state why you are not fit for work and for how long. If you aren’t eligible for SSP, you might have to claim Universal Credit with all the time it takes to do and often the last thing you need if you are unwell for a significant length of time. Making it harder to get the fit note therefore, may force more people down this road if they are too ill to work, but not ill enough for the DWP, currently all of this is part of an ongoing review, but if this is what they’re happy to make public – and by make public, I might be stretching things, there has hardly been any media coverage outside of an article in The I paper about this, because who needs to know if your ability to go sick for any reason might be being made a lot harder going forwards eh?
This move follows a disturbing pattern of punitive welfare reforms that prioritise pushing people into work and in this case making sure they stay there, over genuine healthcare support. The implications are obviously severe: workers may soon find themselves financially penalised for being ill, forced back into work before they are ready, or denied sick pay altogether and pushing them onto benefits, which is exactly what Kendall has already set about making harder as well.
Worse still, these reforms are being framed as a solution to Britain’s economic inactivity crisis, ignoring the real issues behind people being long term sick—crumbling healthcare infrastructure, spiralling NHS waiting lists, and a lack of workplace accommodations for long-term sickness. Now some of what Kendall proposes is to make mitigations in employment surroundings to enable people to keep working when they are ill, but these are obviously not going to be possible in every case, is that going to be more expense to the public purse making it false economy, or are employers going to be asked to foot such bills, which they clearly and obviously wouldn’t do, more likely pursue a course of action to hire a replacement instead. This has been the issue with disabled people being forced towards work by taking PIP away from them, even though that isn’t an out of work benefit, but a supplement to meet the additional expenses of living with disability and is often the very thing keeping them in work. This move seems just as counterintuitive and just as stupid – you cannot will sickness away without dealing with the underlying issues, just as you cannot will away disability – more stick less carrot doesn’t reduce the number of sick or disabled people, it just makes their lives even harder, makes for an increasingly unproductive economy. Instead of addressing these systemic failures, the government is scapegoating the sick, portraying them as a drain on the economy rather than victims of a broken system.
For millions of workers, fit notes are a lifeline. They provide legal protection against dismissal during sickness absence and ensure access to SSP. Crucially, they acknowledge that health recovery is not always immediate—especially with conditions like cancer, severe mental illness, or chronic pain, where treatment delays are rampant due to NHS backlogs. If Liz Kendall needs it pointing out to her why the number of fit notes being issued is rising, this is it.
Yet, the DWP now claims that too many people are being signed off sick, framing this as a problem of worklessness rather than a symptom of deeper healthcare failures and is therefore seeking on one hand by claiming new measures are being brought in to help people keep working whilst ill – completely barmy depending on what they do for a living – but on the other hand make getting a fit note harder. Liz Kendall has made no secret of her intentions. In that recent The I article she declared that the government would overhaul the fit note system to reduce the number of people signed off sick:
‘Speaking to The i Paper, Kendall – who announced billions of pounds in welfare savings in a bid to reduce levels of people claiming disability and out of work incapacity benefits – said she could not rule out having to introduce future cuts in the economic climate.
But the minister said she believed the majority of Labour MPs understood the case for change and her focus was on “getting people into work”.
Kendall revealed a review into how businesses can better support sick and disabled people will look at overhauling the sick note (or fit note) system to stop people being signed off work at current rates.’
This rhetoric is copy and paste of Conservative narratives that blamed benefit claimants for their own hardships and the implication seems obvious, that the government either believes too many people are "skiving" off work, rather than being genuinely ill or aren’t actually so ill they can’t still work, when that should be a decision made between patient and health professional without interference and coercion from the DWP.
The fact is NHS waiting lists for treatment remain at record highs, privatisation having been a massive failure and still Labour under Wes Streeting’s gleeful mismanagement carries on with the decimation. Mental health services are in crisis, with some patients waiting years for therapy. When people cannot access timely treatment, their conditions worsen, that blatantly obviously prolongs sickness absence. Rather than addressing these systemic failures, the government is instead choosing to attack the victims, by putting more people in the position of go to work no matter what’s wrong with you, or you lose your income.
What makes these reforms particularly galling is the hypocrisy involved here in that these were originally Tory proposals and that shouldn’t surprise anyone, the Tories are never on the side of workers. But it was only back in February, that Keir Starmer reportedly scrapped these Conservative plans to tighten fit note rules amidst allegations of union backlash, the Tory line certainly, the unions are there to protect workers, though those still funding Labour clearly aren’t doing that by funding a party taking action such as this.
Yet, just two months later, we hear that Liz Kendall has revived the exact same policy, proving that Labour under Starmer is no different from the Tories when it comes to welfare reform and actually this review began I believer last December, which could imply Starmer was just lying again in February, who would bet against that?
The fit note reforms are part of an independent review as I mentioned before titled Get Britain Working and I mentioned I had severe reservations over the guy conducting it, because it is being led by former John Lewis chairman Charlie Mayfield. The choice of Mayfield—a corporate executive with no background in healthcare or disability rights, though obviously very much has experience of being a boss—speaks volumes about the review’s priorities, which don’t appear to be on the side of the workers as Labour is meant to be.
That said, in a piece to The Times, he made some interesting points.
In one bit her said:
‘He said that focusing upon those already off sick did not work and “prevention is so much cheaper than cure”. He wanted “carrots and sticks within the system for both employers and employees” because under the existing system it made financial and practical sense for companies to replace rather than retain workers. For some staff with bad bosses and worsening health, benefits could become a “rational choice”.’
You can’t prevent illness, if people are too sick to work, forcing them to keep doing so is going to be more harmful, and his bringing up of carrots and sticks doesn’t help either, as you get the impression it’ll be more stick of the employee, more carrot for the employer to keep people on though sick, smaller businesses would find that potentially harder to deal with, so are they going to compensated? In which case where is the saving here?
Mayfield said something else though, which might be saying the quiet part out loud and Kendall might not appreciate such glaring honesty:
‘Mayfield said he was “on a mission to figure out how we create the structures and the support and the incentives such that we can do much better on prevention, retention and rehabilitation”.
He praised as an example the Netherlands, which has seen its historically low employment rate overtake Britain’s in recent decades to become one of the world’s highest, at 83 per cent. Workers there who go off sick see a specialist occupational health doctor within a few days, who can make recommendations to them and their employer on getting back to work, then oversee their recovery.
“How come that is happening?” Mayfield said. “Basically employers are on the hook for 70 per cent of the employee’s wages for two years after they leave.”’
Well done for identifying the elephant in the room Charlie. In the Netherlands people can be seen within a few days and a plan between employee and employer is made towards getting people back to work. Here you get left on a waiting list to see a GP alone that can take weeks let alone any further, let alone to the point a treatment plan and therefore an employment plan could be drawn up. Fix the damned NHS, renationalise it properly, lick private interests out and have a health service for for purpose, otherwise you lose a nation fit for work. Fat chance of that happening when so many Labour figures, not least Streeting have accepted so much in the way of private healthcare donations.
Therefore regardless of Mayfield’s finding and even if my cynicism proves unfounded and he does a decent job of identifying the barriers surrounding long term sickness and getting back to work in a way that works both ways, for employee and employer alike, the take from Kendall is to get more people off the sick without addressing those underlying causes, a numbers game just as it was with the disabled, therefore this all comes across to me as a corporate-driven agenda to squeeze more labour out of an already exhausted and increasingly unwell workforce by a Labour Party that sold out to those same corporations and bosses, the likes of which is literally heading this review.
Undermining trust in Kendall’s review even further though, has been the fact that in the last week she has been caught out using misleading statistics to justify her new social security reforms.
Kendall has fallen deservedly afoul of the Office for Statistics Regulation, the OSR, for misleading the public about the number of people claiming Universal Credit who were not required to look for work. The DWP had made the preposterous claim that the number of people on Universal Credit who were no longer required to look for work had to be brought down because numbers had risen by 383% since the pandemic. The truth of the matter is, they’ve risen by 50%. Well that’s Long Covid for you, that is Boris Johnson’s idiocy for you, that is a Tory made problem you now have to deal with, but instead of doing that, the DWP under Kendall concocted false numbers which they have no been forced to correct in order to justify carrying on exactly as the Tories did before. Some change.
The proposed fit note reforms are not about helping people back to work—on the face of it, they seem set to be about coercing them, regardless of their health. By making it harder to access sick leave, the government is effectively punishing workers for systemic failures in healthcare and employment support.
Labour’s embrace of these policies exposes its true colours, which are blue through and through, this is Tory policy, this is a party no longer committed to social justice, but to perpetuating Tory-style cruelty. Instead of addressing the real causes of long-term sickness—NHS underfunding, poor workplace protections, and exploitative employment practices—the government is choosing to blame the victims and penalise them instead of supporting them.
This is all part of an ongoing review, but they’ve been publicised nonetheless. If these reforms go ahead, the consequences will be dire. More people will be forced to work while sick, worsening their conditions, I have little faith investment will be there to support people into staying in work, unless it is a bribe to employers and no help to the employed and therefore how much will it cost rather than save? Others may lose their jobs entirely, pushed into poverty or forced to claim benefits when they otherwise might have been able to continue after respite. And the most vulnerable—those with chronic illnesses or disabilities—will bear the brunt most of all in the workplace.
The fight for a fairer welfare system is not over. But if we do not act now, the right to simply be sick as wel all get from time to time—without fear of punishment—will be gone.
Meanwhile, Rachel Reeves sums when it comes to those proposed benefit cuts aren’t adding up either, because by stripping more cash away from more disabled people via PIP cuts, she also strips money from a crucial sector of society her plans made no allowance for at all – the unpaid carers who look after said disabled people and the money they save the nation is equivalent to a second NHS budget. Catastrophe looms, the cuts won’t work, get all the details of that story in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch. Please do also hit like, share and subscribe if you haven’t already done so, so as to ensure you don’t miss out on all new content published daily, as well as supporting the channel at the same time which is very much appreciated, holding power to account for ordinary working class people and I will hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.