UK Politics

3103 readers

409 users here now

General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

tom

GreatAlbatross

flamingos

frankPodmore@slrpnk.net

Sick pay timebomb that risks a lost generation of workers - BBC News (www.bbc.co.uk)

submitted 1 month ago by sabreW4K3@lazysoci.al to c/uk_politics

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So we need a UBI then?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Emperor 3 points 1 month ago

The IFS’s deep dive on the claimant statistics reveals that claimants were younger and their claims increasingly focused on mental health. New awards made to under-40s more than doubled from 4,500 a month before the pandemic to 11,500 last year. Over the same time period, the percentage of all new awards primarily for mental health conditions went from 28% to 37%, an increase from 3,900 claims a month to 12,100 a month.

Anecdotally I saw a lot more mental health issues emerge in the children I know who were going through secondary school during lockdown and a lot are either now at university (or planning on which to go to) or have recently graduated.

That's your ticking time bomb and needs to be addressed ASAP. Fiddling with benefits or introducing changes in the workplace or job centre seem like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. What they need is faster access to better quality health care. Every example I know of involved a long fight to get a diagnosis and in most cases their treatment under CAMHS was inadequate (they got more help at university). So if the government want to invest to improve the lives of younger people then this is where it is needed.

And could this same generation also be at the sharp end of the explosion of AI replacing a wide set of entry-level jobs - in call centres, retail, law, the financial and creative industries and much more. Britain’s biggest corporations are racing to implement effective AI solutions to handle everything from customer service to their marketing output.

These transformations are happening more quickly than had been expected, affecting everyone from entry level front-line workers through to highly skilled professionals such as art workers, media planners and legal clerks. It will inevitably become a significant reality - perhaps the defining social and economic change over the course of this Parliament.

And that seems like the elephant in the room. Call centres in particular are going to be hammered (as will fulfillment centres) and a lot were established in areas hit by the collapse of mining or heavy industry. When they go, there will be nothing left in those communities.