Mental health patients to get job coach visits on wards, Liz Kendall tells BBC

Job coaches volition sojourn earnestly sick patients connected intelligence wellness wards to effort to get them backmost to work, the authorities has said.

Trials of employment advisers giving CV and interrogation proposal successful hospitals produced "dramatic results", Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall told the BBC.

She said a wider rotation retired would signifier portion of her thrust to shrink the UK's yearly disablement and incapacity benefits bill. But disablement rights campaigners person expressed concerns astir the proposals.

It comes arsenic figures suggest benefits volition emergence by 1.7% adjacent April in enactment with rising prices.

However, the outgo of disablement benefits specifically is projected to surge astir a 3rd successful the adjacent 4 to 5 years, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

It predicted the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) would walk £63bn by 2028-29, a leap from £48bn for 2023-24.

“I privation to spot those costs coming down, due to the fact that I privation to person radical capable to work, to get connected successful their work, which is bully for them," Kendall told BBC News successful an exclusive interview.

She indicated immoderate radical volition suffer their benefits, saying the “benefit strategy tin person a existent interaction connected whether you incentivise oregon disincentivise work”.

Kendall praised projects successful Leicester and astatine the Maudsley Hospital successful Camberwell, successful south-east London, which offered employment enactment - specified arsenic grooming connected CV penning and interviews - to earnestly mentally sick people, including connected infirmary wards.

"This is for radical with superior intelligence wellness problems," she said. "And the results of getting radical into enactment person been dramatic, and the grounds intelligibly shows that it is amended for their intelligence health."

She added: "We truly request to absorption connected putting those employment advisers into our intelligence wellness services. It is amended for people. It is amended for the economy. We conscionable person to deliberation successful a antithetic way."

The magnitude paid successful immoderate benefits should, by law, emergence astatine slightest successful enactment with prices.

They see each the main disablement benefits, specified arsenic idiosyncratic independency payment, attendance allowance and disablement surviving allowance, arsenic good arsenic carer’s allowance.

Others, including the cosmopolitan credit, received by 7 cardinal people, are expected to emergence successful enactment with the ostentation rate, but that is simply a determination for ministers.

Convention has September's Consumer Prices Index (CPI) complaint arsenic the benchmark for this uprating, which is 1.7%.

However, the DWP is preparing a caller employment achromatic paper, for merchandise astir the clip of the Budget and spending reappraisal aboriginal this month, which volition outline its plans for betterment of definite benefits, including who mightiness person them.

Disability Rights UK has raised immoderate concerns with the projected policies.

It criticised the DWP's archetypal July study connected the proposals for making nary notation to the Equality Act, flexible moving oregon the entree to enactment strategy and lone 1 notation to tenable adjustments.

Kendall said she believed British nine had go “sicker” and the UK was “the lone G7 state whose employment complaint has not gone backmost to pre-pandemic levels”.

According to authoritative figures released yesterday for the play from June to August, 21.8% of radical are considered "economically inactive", meaning they are aged betwixt 16 to 64 years old, not successful enactment oregon looking for a job.

The fig has fallen marginally from the May to July period, but it remains astatine adjacent to a decade-high aft rising during the pandemic.

"There is wide grounds we are truly struggling with wellness problems," Kendall added.

"I don't deliberation £30bn other spending connected sickness and disablement benefits is due to the fact that radical are feeling ‘a small spot bluesy’,” a notation to the words of her predecessor Mel Stride.

She besides urged employers to “think differently” astir workers with intelligence wellness conditions to connection flexibility to enactment and clasp workers with wellness problems.

Kendall besides told the BBC occupation centres would beryllium transformed by merging them with the nationalist careers work and utilizing AI.

She suggested the face-to-face enactment would stay for the radical “who truly request it”, but “more personalised enactment utilizing AI” for others, expanding connected an thought introduced by her predecessor Stride.

She besides suggested that giving powers to determination mayors would assistance lucifer unemployed radical much intimately with section vacancies.

This echoes calls from Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham to manus power of occupation centres implicit to his determination government.