DWP NHS Talking Therapies strategy for pushing people with mental distress and ill-health into paid employment will not work
Disabled people’s mental health groups say the figures destroy the government’s case for “using mental health interventions as a stick to enforce work” and have called on Ministers to rethink their “harmful” disability employment strategy.
The government placed an expansion of NHS Talking Therapies – which already costs hundreds of millions of pounds a year – at the centre of last month’s Get Britain Working white paper.
The white paper announced: “To tackle poor mental health, the leading driver of ill health-related inactivity, the government has committed to continuing to expand access to NHS Talking Therapies for adults with common mental health conditions in England.”
The white paper claimed that “extensive literature and studies” showed that NHS Talking Therapies improved employment outcomes.
The last Conservative government had also placed a massive expansion of NHS Talking Therapies at the heart of its own Back to Work Plan last year.
Last month, the new Labour government’s white paper mentioned a forthcoming evaluation of the impact of NHS Talking Therapies.
But when that research was published last week by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), there was no mention of it on the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) website, and no press release issued by work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall.
What the ONS research showed – based on analysis of nearly 600,000 people* with “common mental disorders like anxiety and depression” who completed NHS talking therapy – was that this treatment had almost no impact on the probability of being in work after seven years.
After three years, there was an increase of just 1.4 percentage points in the probability of someone being a paid employee, and after seven years that had increased to only 1.5 percentage points.
To qualify as being a “paid employee” in the study, someone only needed to have earned more than £0 in a month.
After three years, the average increase in monthly earnings for someone who had completed the treatment was just £17.
The impact of the therapy was even lower for disabled people who had not been working before the therapy began, with the probability of being a paid employee even decreasing in the first couple of years after treatment, and then only rising by 0.1 percentage points by the sixth year, although it increased by 0.6 percentage points after seven years.
The research also found that average monthly earnings fell after talking therapy for disabled people who had not been working before the treatment started, dropping by nearly £16 in the first year and as much as £23 a month by the seventh year.
Amy Wells, senior communications and membership manager for National Survivor User Network, said: “It becomes ever more transparent and worrying that our government is intent on pushing disabled people — and those living with mental ill-health — back into work, in place of genuine, comprehensive support.
“Little regard is being paid to whether it is possible or beneficial for disabled people to get ‘back into work’, furthering the rhetoric that people are not valuable beyond their contributions to the economy.
“The majority of investment for these plans is being funnelled into talking therapies, with the expectation of its ability to ‘support’ people back to work, which has now been shown to have a very insignificant impact on individual employment status.
“What this new data shows is that the government’s plans are not only harmful, but that they also will not work.
“We find these developments incredibly disappointing and call for a rethink of the government’s strategy around disability employment.”
Rick Burgess, a spokesperson for the grassroots, user-led mental health group Recovery in the Bin, said the ONS data “destroys the government’s case for using mental health interventions as a stick to enforce work” which instead was “just a fig leaf for cuts”.
He said: “The tiny statistical positive effect does not justify the polluting of healthcare with coercive work requirements.”
He also pointed to the ONS research stating that only Asian and white ethnic groups saw statistically significant positive impacts from the therapy on their monthly pay and chances of being in paid work, which he said shows the policy is “racist” and that DWP is “proposing a policy that discriminates”.
And he said there was “growing scepticism of the efficacy and suitability of cognitive behavioural therapy**” within the talking therapies programme.
He said: “This leaves Liz Kendall yet again claiming policy success while evidence proves the opposite, and trying to hide £3 billion in cuts.
“There is simply no future in the DWP’s approach, yet they flog this dead horse because the suffering is borne not by them, but by us, as the prevention of future deaths reports mount up.”
Source and for further information see the Disability News Service article New government figures show key policy at heart of disability employment strategy ‘will not work’ available from disabilitynewsservice.com.
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