Fit for Work. Fit for What?

Britain already requires people to look for work

Universal Credit is not an unconditional payment for everybody who happens not to have a job. Claimants in the relevant work-search groups already agree a claimant commitment, and sanctions already exist for failing without good reason to meet particular requirements.

Before punishing somebody for failing to get a job, how much control did they actually have over the getting?

STEP ONE

Fine. Find the work.

The latest official estimate puts UK vacancies at approximately 691,000 in July to September 2026, the first reading below 700,000 since 2021. In June to August 2026 there were 2.4 unemployed people for every vacancy.

That does not mean every unemployed person is competing for every vacancy. Geography, skills, pay, hours, transport, health and childcare all matter.

There is not one suitable vacancy sitting there waiting for every unemployed person to decide they fancy working.

Now find the employer

Political discussions about employment often seem to imagine every employer looks like Tesco: huge HR department, occupational health, hundreds of roles, multiple managers and enough people to redistribute work.

But Britain is overwhelmingly a small-business economy by number of firms. Think about the café employing seven people, the electrical contractor employing four, the shop employing five or the building contractor employing twelve.

Recent ONS data show vacancies among businesses employing one to nine people falling roughly 23.5% year-on-year. ONS reported employer feedback suggesting increased labour costs were one factor discouraging recruitment among smaller firms.

Give somebody a chance.

Perhaps the employer wants to. But wanting to employ somebody and being able to absorb the risk are not always the same thing.

“They can work” is only half a sentence

Having ADHD does not mean somebody cannot work. Having anxiety does not mean somebody cannot work. Having a physical disability does not mean somebody cannot work. Plenty of people with all of those conditions already do.

Two people with the same diagnosis can have completely different abilities and support needs. One person may need virtually nothing. Another might benefit from predictable shifts, a fixed workstation, different communication, additional onboarding, flexible hours, a phased return, specialist equipment, a support worker, time for treatment or a change in how particular tasks are organised.

Some adjustments cost money. Others cost management time. Both are real costs.

Britain already knows support is sometimes necessary

Employers have legal duties under the Equality Act to make reasonable adjustments for disabled workers. There is also Access to Work, which can help with additional disability-related workplace costs such as specialist equipment, support workers, travel and some workplace mental-health support.

But Access to Work does not simply transfer every adjustment cost to government. Ordinary reasonable adjustments remain an employer responsibility.

If government wants employers to absorb substantially more people with health-related barriers to employment, what investment does it expect employers to make — and who helps them make it?

Then comes the number Britain cannot ignore

Roughly 2.8 million working-age people are economically inactive primarily because of long-term sickness.

Around 300,000 people with health conditions leave employment each year.

Government work-and-health evidence suggests that after four to six weeks of absence the chance of returning can still be around 96%. After a year, fewer than half return. Once someone is economically inactive for health reasons, the probability of entering work within a year is reported at only around 3.8%.

Why did we let them leave work?

Parliament looks at somebody who has spent three years outside employment and asks:

Why aren’t you working?

Perhaps the more useful question was available three years earlier:

Why are you about to leave work?

Could the job have changed? Could their hours have changed? Could treatment have happened earlier? Could occupational health have intervened? Could somebody have returned gradually? Could a small employer have received practical help to retain them?

The cheapest person to get back into work may be the person we never allowed to fall out of it.

Then politics starts the story with the claimant

Britain gets to the expensive end of a problem and suddenly becomes fascinated by individual behaviour.

The claimant didn’t design Universal Credit. The claimant didn’t determine NHS capacity. The claimant didn’t design Britain’s apprenticeship system. The claimant didn’t decide housing policy. The claimant didn’t determine occupational-health provision. The claimant didn’t negotiate Brexit. The claimant didn’t determine Britain’s industrial strategy.

There is no single villain. Successive governments, Parliaments, businesses, voters and global forces all played roles. But when the consequences appear on a welfare budget, political suspicion has an extraordinary tendency to travel downwards.

“I paid in all my life”

You’ve heard that sentence. Pensioners can say it because there is a genuine contributory element to the State Pension. National Insurance records matter.

But a 21-year-old cannot say they have paid in for 40 years.

Not because they refused to contribute.

They haven’t been alive for 40 years.

When contribution history becomes not only an entitlement mechanism but a moral test of deservingness, age itself creates an advantage. An older worker can point to decades of contributions. A young adult entering a weak labour market cannot manufacture a contribution history they have not had time to build.

“It’s taxpayers’ money”

Of course welfare is public money. But what follows from that?

Does receiving public support mean the state acquires greater authority over your individual consumption choices?

A person earning £100,000 can drink, smoke, gamble or make terrible financial decisions. Government taxes and regulates those activities, but it does not normally decide at the checkout whether that adult is permitted to make the purchase.

A restricted welfare card creates a different principle: because part of your income comes from the state, the state can attach restrictions to how it is spent.

Supporters have a coherent argument: taxpayers should not subsidise alcohol, cigarettes or gambling.

The counter-question is just as coherent:

Does controlling somebody’s consumption solve the reason they need welfare?

From safety net to spending card

The proposed British system has not yet been published with a complete technical architecture. We do not yet know the final card provider, payment network, retailer integration, exception process or precise mechanism by which every restricted product would be identified.

Blocking a bookmaker by merchant category is one thing. Blocking a bottle of vodka inside a supermarket basket containing bread, milk, toothpaste and washing powder is another.

America’s SNAP/EBT infrastructure demonstrates that product-level restriction can be done, but it relies on an established system in which eligible and ineligible products can be distinguished at participating retailers.

Australia provides the more relevant warning about welfare income management.

Australia already tried the experiment

Australia introduced a Cashless Debit Card that placed a large share of welfare payments into a restricted account, limiting cash access and spending on alcohol and gambling.

Its independent national auditor later concluded that government had not demonstrated that the programme was meeting its intended objectives. Evidence for employment and some wider social outcomes was insufficient or difficult to attribute causally.

A cost-benefit analysis examined quantified benefits including reductions in alcohol and gambling harm against programme costs. The programme costs were estimated at about A$68.3 million, substantially above the quantified benefits included in that analysis.

That does not prove a British scheme would produce identical results. It does prove that controlling welfare expenditure is itself an administrative programme with costs, implementation problems and outcomes that have to be measured.

What happens when the card works exactly as designed?

Suppose the card works perfectly.

Somebody has £400. They previously spent £30 on cigarettes. The card prevents the purchase.

Fine.

Are they now employed?

No vacancy has appeared. No employer has hired them. Their chronic pain has not been treated. Their skills have not changed. Their local transport has not improved. A small employer has not gained extra capacity to support them.

We have changed consumption.

That may be the policy objective. But it should not be confused with creating employment.

And what happens when real life doesn’t fit the card?

Perhaps I have lived in Britain too long, but whenever somebody proposes another government-administered payment system involving hundreds of thousands of people, prohibited purchases, exemptions, appeals, IT contracts and individual circumstances, my first question isn’t whether the PowerPoint works.

It’s what happens at 7.30 on a Friday evening when the card doesn’t.

What happens with a second-hand washing machine? A market stall? A private sale? Splitting household bills? Giving somebody petrol money? An emergency taxi? A retailer whose merchant category is wrong? A mixed supermarket basket? A legitimate need for cash?

And if people still want prohibited goods, what happens to demand? Does it disappear, or move into resale, barter, borrowing, informal exchange or other secondary markets?

I am not going to pretend the evidence proves that restricted cards cause more crime. It doesn’t. But displacement and circumvention are obvious policy risks and were considered in Australia’s own evaluation framework.

Every exception creates administration. Every loophole closed creates another rule. Someone builds the IT. Someone gets the contract. Someone answers the appeal.

How much will Britain spend policing how poor people spend their money — and how many sustained jobs will that spending create?

There is another contradiction sitting in plain sight

Britain spends enormous political energy telling some adults that they must work while maintaining another category of adults whom it generally does not permit to work normally.

People seeking asylum while their claims are being decided are normally prohibited from ordinary employment. Permission can generally be requested only after a claim has been outstanding for more than 12 months through no fault of the applicant; grants made from 26 March 2026 are restricted to eligible occupations at RQF level 6 or above.

If destitute, the state may provide accommodation and a small weekly subsistence allowance while the claim is considered.

This is not an argument about whether somebody should be granted asylum. Border control, identity, safeguarding and the integrity of the asylum system matter.

It is a narrower economic question.

If somebody is already here awaiting a legal decision, wants to work and an employer wants to employ them, why is paying to keep them outside the labour market necessarily the better option?

One group is told: find work.

Another may say: I would like to work.

And the state can tell both of them no in different ways.