Predictably, the recent BBC Question Time (QT) debate on benefit cuts was hijacked by the professional bleeding hearts, who like to portray any proposed reform as an attack on working people. Unfortunately for them they shot themselves in both feet, when a woman who admitted being on benefits for ‘mild anxiety’ had no problem talking on live TV:
I was struck by this lady talking about her “anxiety” while having no problem asking questions on a live national TV show
I don’t think the British people should have to pay £3.5 BILLION a year to support people with mild mental health issuespic.twitter.com/V333lT47ea
— Matt Goodwin (@GoodwinMJ) November 1, 2025
In my experience the professional claimants who have little or nothing wrong with them, but who spend months or even years claiming benefits, tend to be just that – articulate middle-class professionals. Just like the lady on QT, in fact. They also tend to be public sector workers.
I do not dispute that mental health is a serious issue, as a glance at young male suicide statistics will confirm. While I’ve never admitted it to anyone before, and I hesitate to admit it now, I was close to it once, in my twenties. What saved me? Well, for one I’d had two close friends who’d killed themselves. One had blown off most of his head with a shotgun aged 18 on Christmas Eve, 1980, after a fall-out with a girlfriend. My mother was one of the last people to see him alive when she gave him 10p to make what turned out to be his final, fatal phone call to the girl he’d split with. The other hanged himself aged 20, in 1984. I don’t know why. We’d been to the Woodhouse Moor fair in Leeds together the week before and had had a good time with a couple of girls. His dad came downstairs in the morning and found him hanging from a beam in the kitchen. I’d seen what those deaths did to their parents, and as an only child born after my parents had been married for eighteen years, I could not do it to mine. I got through my depression by working, filling every available minute, not giving myself time to stew on my troubles. I don’t pretend to have any qualifications in psychiatry, but I do truly believe in the beneficial effect of work on mental health. It saved me, and I saw it benefit friends of mine who finally got work after being stuck on the dole for long periods in the 1980s.
There are those, though, who just don’t want to work. As an Independent Financial Adviser, I see people stating their intention to see their doctor, claim ‘stress and anxiety,’ and get signed off sick because they don’t like their line manager, or how their job has changed, or because they’ve “done their bit and paid in enough” as one put it, and therefore feel entitled to retire early. One woman, previously a teacher, had been receiving monthly Income Protection Insurance policy benefits for well over twenty years, yet during that time she’d lived a full life and tried her hand at a number of businesses. Another, a former local authority health centre manager had been paid £54,500pa for years on a similar policy; a claim which he intended to keep benefiting from until the policy expired at age 65, despite him having his own business. Anyone in the financial advice profession will recognise the ‘red flag’ there, i.e., public sector workers very rarely take out private Income Protection Insurance, preferring instead to rely on the over-generous benefits their employment provides. He’d planned that claim. He also admitted that while he wasn’t a smoker, he’d told his doctor he was, years before, so that he could eventually benefit from enhanced smoker annuity rates when he cashed in the sizeable personal pension fund he’d built up running his business whilst still claiming on his policy. I declined to take him on as a client.
In every job I’ve ever had, the only people who’ve gone off sick long-term with supposed mental health problems have been the lazy and/or incompetent types who’ve been no good at their jobs anyway, and knew it, and who therefore knew their days were numbered. I’ve also had experience of such people in my own business and in a voluntary organisation I help run.
I’ve long been involved with MAG, the Motorcycle Action Group, a bikers’ lobby group run largely by volunteers but with a small paid secretariat. I joined in 1981 aged 17 and was elected National Chairman in 1989. Having retired after a long stint from its Board in 2004 however, I was persuaded to return to it in 2013 to solve a management problem. The two senior paid people were running a magazine and motorcycle touring business from MAG’s premises on MAG’s time, aided by a third employee, a woman they’d hired to cover for them. The previous volunteer Board had foolishly allowed the ringleader, a former local government employee, to write his and his colleagues’ contracts. To say they were generous was an understatement. They provided the sort of sick pay benefits public sector workers get when they are underwritten by the ever-obliging taxpayer. In MAG’s case though, every penny had to be raised by volunteers. He’d cunningly planned for the eventuality that somebody might one day realise how they were betraying the trust placed in them, and so it transpired. As soon as I and the fellow director who’d been put in place with me to ‘clean house’ started troubleshooting the problem, all three went off sick claiming ‘stress and anxiety,’ signed off by their obliging GPs. I’ve had many doctors as clients over the years. Privately, they all admit to signing such people off work even though they know there is really nothing wrong with them. They take no pleasure in assisting the defrauding of taxpayers, but they can’t afford the time that such malingerers burn, or the trouble they can cause. They are the type who know every box to tick, every string to pull, and how to phrase a complaint if they aren’t getting the ‘care’ they want.
In MAG’s case, whilst our three well-paid professionals were too stressed and anxious to work for us, they were still perfectly well enough to publish their magazine, to go on holidays, and to run their private motorcycle touring business, even organising a tour of Tibet.
I’ve even had it happen in my own business, though like any sensible private sector employer, I put precautions in place. Our contract of employment provides for Statutory Sick Pay only. In reality we are generous, we use our discretion, and we have never been stingy, but no way am I getting caught like MAG. This proved a sensible precaution when I hired a young woman just after the first lockdown. She’d hidden under her duvet for months, telling her then employer, Jet 2, that she had ‘stress and anxiety,’ coached on what to say, no doubt, by her mother who worked in HR for the NHS. Normally I wouldn’t hire somebody who’d been off a long time for such a reason, but she was young, local, and I felt sorry for her. She recovered Lazarus-style when we offered her a job and for a while all was well. Before long however, she turned out to be just as workshy as before. It was a joyful day when I accepted her resignation.
The Solution
Where social security benefits are concerned, changes are politically controversial, and the long-suffering taxpayer gets stuck with the bill whether they like it or not. Where the private sector is concerned, however, the problem could be solved a lot sooner. If I ran a life insurance company, I’d bring out an Income Protection Insurance policy that covered only provable physical injuries and illnesses with no mental health cover at all, absolutely zero. Mental illness is just too easy to fake and too hard to disprove. Excluding the potential for such fraudulent claims should enable insurers to offer policies at much lower rates of premium than is currently the case. I’m not saying that insurers should not offer cover for mental health problems, but such cover should be priced separately. I suspect though that once insurers have some claims experience under their belts for policies where mental health cover is selected, it’ll be limited in duration or will cease to be made available at all.
And if so, so be it. Why should the rest of us subsidise the professionally idle?
Neil F. Liversidge is an Independent Financial Adviser running his own firm in Castleford, West Riding Personal Financial Solutions Ltd, www.wrpfs.com. For 39 years until 2017 he was a member of the Labour Party. A Brexiteer, he voted Conservative in 2019 and is now a member of Reform UK, the New Culture Forum, and the Free Speech Union.
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