Richard Murphy put it in one sentence this week: you cannot destroy jobs and demand that more people work at the same time.

He was writing about Labour’s employment policy. The Bank of England is holding interest rates high and pursuing quantitative tightening, which restricts investment and reduces the number of jobs available. At the same time, ministers are placing more pressure on health and disability benefit claimants to find work. Both things are happening at once, and they cannot both make sense.

The contradiction has a history

This isn’t new thinking, it’s the same move made sharper. In April, Tony Blair’s institute proposed reclassifying anxiety, depression, ADHD and autism as “non-work-limiting” conditions, with claimants assumed fit for work by default. Murphy went through the report and found not a single reference to medical evidence. A policy about health, with no medicine in it.

Concern about how many people are out of work with poor health is real, and I’m not dismissing it. But notice what the response does. It doesn’t ask why more than a thousand people a day are claiming ill-health benefits. It asks how to redefine them so they stop counting.

The numbers that actually answer the why are available. Healthy life expectancy in the UK has fallen by two years since 2012, to 60.7 years for men and 60.9 for women, against a state pension age heading for 67. In Richmond upon Thames it’s around 69. In parts of Blackpool it’s barely above 50. A twenty-year gap in healthy life is not a twenty-year gap in personal choices.

Work is not the escape route it’s claimed to be

The standard answer is that work is the way out. Prem Sikka’s recent analysis shows why that answer keeps failing. Workers’ share of what the economy produces has fallen from 71.9% in 1975 to 59% now. The real average wage has barely moved since 2008. Almost a third of universal credit claimants are already in work. Over four million jobs pay below the real living wage.

So the policy demands people take work, and the work on offer doesn’t pay enough to live on, and the conditions of that work are part of what’s making people unwell in the first place. Sikka calls poverty part of a social violence that exhausts people and removes hope. Exhaustion and hopelessness are also what I hear described in training rooms, by people in jobs.

The demand is always made of the person. The cause sits in the policy.

I’m not writing this from the outside

Benefits have been part of my income for most of my life, because of my health. Only in the periods when I’ve been entirely out of work have I relied on them completely. The rest of the time they’ve done something the public conversation barely admits exists: topped up what I could earn, providing the stability my health can’t provide on its own.

That distinction matters, because “benefit recipient” has been made to mean “not working”. Media coverage runs that way, and government does little to correct it. Remember the statistic above: almost a third of universal credit claimants are in work. I’ve spent much of my life inside that statistic. I also receive Adult Disability Payment, which has nothing to do with whether you work at all. It exists because having health challenges costs more.

Look at what the top-up actually is: the system’s own admission that a set number of hours, the same every week, is precisely what fluctuating health can’t promise. My long periods out of paid work were never periods out of volunteering, because volunteering offered the flexibility employment wouldn’t. It’s why I work for myself now. The accommodation is built into the system’s own design, and still the policy rhetoric insists the problem is effort.

I’ve dealt with the DWP through more than thirty years of policy decisions, and the pattern holds: rigid systems that work for no one. Not for claimants, who can’t make fluctuating health fit fixed rules. Not for employers, who lose people the rules won’t let them keep flexibly. Not even for the Treasury, which pays for the churn.

I also teach mental health first aid, so I see the workplace end too, and it matches. People arrive at our courses carrying feelings of stress and anxiety that track directly to insecure contracts, unpredictable hours and pay that doesn’t stretch. Then their employers ask them to be more resilient, as if the contracts, the hours and the pay just happened by themselves.

That’s the same contradiction at a smaller scale. You can’t make someone’s job insecure and then ask them not to feel it.

Work adjusted to people, not people adjusted to work

Murphy ends his analysis with a line I’d pin above every HR strategy document: what’s needed is work adjusted to the needs of people, not people adjusted to the needs of work. A government can choose that. So can a workplace, without waiting for permission. Notice what your people are carrying before you hand them an app and a target.

The question underneath all of it is the one Murphy keeps asking: whether anyone deciding these things is willing to admit we need a politics of care. The evidence says we do. The policy says we’d rather not.

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