On Monday night, former England manager Gareth Southgate joined MPs and philanthropists for an event in Westminster described as ‘the Oscars of the charity world’. Cabinet ministers Lisa Nandy and Bridget Phillipson joined the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) in handing out prizes to five charities that help those who fall through the cracks. Across the winners, a single theme stood out: the transformative power of a good job.

But Britain is running out of those jobs. Vacancies are falling, unemployment has risen to 5 per cent, while a deeper crisis sits beneath both: nine million working age people are economically inactive, including more than four million on out-of-work benefits with ‘no work requirement’. Nearly every EU country has rebuilt its workforce since Covid; Britain has not. If we had matched America, 371,000 more people would be in work; France, more than a million; Hungary, almost 2.5 million. The Centre for Economics and Business Research puts the cost of our drift into welfare at £40 billion by the end of this parliament. Had we avoided this, there would be no black hole at Wednesday’s Budget.

You might expect the party of the workers to care about this. Once, Labour did: a decade ago the then shadow work and pensions secretary, Rachel Reeves, bluntly told benefit claimants: ‘We are not the party of people on benefits… We’re not the party to represent those who are out of work.’ Today, she shows little of that pro-work zeal. The Timms Review into the Personal Independence Payment (PIP) system won’t report until next autumn and is explicitly forbidden from making savings. It will move no one into work, and the welfare........

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