Eight years on, sick list still used to conceal unemployment level

MORE than two-thirds of Scots deemed too sick to work in the last year have come straight off the jobless register - undermining Labour’s claims to have stopped using the sick list to conceal unemployment.

The Scotsman has established that, of the 82,600 people who joined Scotland’s army of incapacity benefit claimants last year, 55,200 had previously been registered unemployed.

The explosive disclosure was seized on by Scottish National Party and Conservatives as proof that Labour is bankrolling a sickness culture - which is also massaging down unemployment figures before an election.

Despite being in power for eight years, Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, yesterday laid the blame for the large incapacity benefit count at the feet of the Conservatives.

"We know perfectly well that during the 1980s many people were transferred on to incapacity benefit because unemployment was high and people thought at the time that was a way of concealing the true levels of unemployment," he said in a speech.

When confronted by The Scotsman figures, Mr Blair’s spokesman declined to give an assurance that the practice had ended under Labour.

"He was talking about what happened under a previous administration - I would simply leave it at that," the spokesman said.

Alan Johnson, the Work and Pensions Secretary, will today unveil a five-year plan for shaking up the welfare system aimed at cracking the stubborn problem of incapacity benefit. In Scotland, it is claimed by 266,000 - larger than the population of Aberdeen or Dundee.

But Mr Johnson last week told the House of Commons that, in Scotland’s case, the extraordinary incapacity count - which now includes one in 12 of all Scottish working-age adults, was not being drawn from the unemployed.

"The simple facts are that in Scotland the claimant count has fallen by 71,000 and over the same period the number on incapacity benefit has fallen by 1,000," he said. "So it cannot be the case that people are being moved from one to the other."

But figures placed in the House of Commons library - beyond the reach of the public or journalists - show that the unemployment list is the biggest single source of new incapacity claimants.

Alex Salmond, Scottish National Party leader, said this cast a new light on Labour’s claim to have reduced unemployment to record lows in Scotland.

"Labour has been caught bang to rights doing what they said they would never do - massaging unemployment by using incapacity," he said. "If it looks like a fiddle and sounds like a fiddle, it probably is a fiddle."

For the Conservatives, Peter Duncan, the shadow Scotland secretary, said the disclosure showed "exactly the kind of manipulation of figures that has decimated the public’s trust in the government".

Anne Begg, the Aberdeen South MP, today defends the government’s case in an article for The Scotsman - saying it was the Conservatives, not Labour, who used the incapacity tag to flatter unemployment figures.

She argues that the picture was transformed in the Thatcher years from 700,000 claimants to 2.5 million when Labour took over.

This created the "hidden unemployed", she says, whom "the Tory government shifted off the unemployment register to keep the figures down and then promptly forgot about".

The Department for Work and Pensions confirmed the figures shown to The Scotsman were drawn by asking each new claimant what they had been doing previously - and not whether they were formally claiming jobseekers’ allowance.