Nearly one in six British adults – 6.7 million people – are now claiming out-of-work benefits. In over 3,300 neighbourhoods, claimants make up more than half the working-age population. In almost 19,000 they make up more than a third.

An historic shift from unemployment benefits to health-related claims has hidden this national scandal. In the last six years, the number of working-age adults claiming due to incapacity rose by 61 per cent, even as the prevalence of disability increased by only 16 per cent.

It is not hard to explain. Unlike in other countries, combining multiple cash-based benefits with a mental health claim exempts recipients from onerous work requirements and unlocks support that can deliver a tax-free income of over £27,000. Throw in the fall in face-to-face assessments and several years of legal judgments lowering the bar for conditions such as anxiety or ADHD and the case seems closed.

This is the reverse of the supposed heyday of the welfare state

But State of Dependency, a new report released this week by the Centre for Social Justice, (CSJ) suggests that more is going on. The 3,300 welfare hotspots are unevenly distributed. Birmingham has 116 of them. Liverpool has 112. Fifteen per cent of Blackpool’s neighbourhoods fit the bill.

Nor are these concentrations new. The list of local authorities with the most benefit claims in 2026 is almost identical to the list in 2006 and in 1996. The benefits have changed; the hotspots have not. Rather, the CSJ’s findings burst any notion that Britain’s benefits are a safety net for the temporarily disheartened. They are not. In the year-long inquiry and accompanying 250-page report, working-age welfare emerges as an economic opiate – numbing the pain of intergenerational stagnation. The local authorities topping the list have barely grown since the 1990s.

One such place is my home city of Bradford. In my three decades on this earth, Britain’s fourth largest metropolitan area has grown, in real terms, by a total of £880 per person. An annual growth rate barely above zero.

Bradford is a microcosm of Britain’s economic failures. Attempts to revitalise the city have foundered. The shopping centre meant to catalyse regeneration in the 2000s spent 12 years as an embarrassing hole, while the through station and trams intended to connect the city to its thriving neighbours has been promised, forgotten, promised again, and delayed. Mass immigration, meanwhile, has transformed its demographics and labour market beyond recognition.

The same story recurs across the UK. The report’s analysis reveals that over the last twenty years, the government spent £1.1 trillion more on working-age benefits than it invested in transport, science and technology and housing combined.

This is the reverse of the supposed heyday of the welfare state. Between 1949 and 1975, Britain spent, on average, only 2.5 per cent of GDP on non-pensioner benefits compared to 4.6 per cent on public investment. The ratio has switched since 1975, with the state spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on public investment, on average, and 5 per cent on benefits.

The consequence is that we both lack the basic infrastructure to crowd-in private investment and strangle that investment in a desperate attempt to fund our ever-expanding welfare bill. Britain has fewer than half the motorways per 1,000 km squared of Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and France, and far less electrified rail, while employers now pay 2.7 times more in social contributions to hire a full-time worker in the UK than they would pay in Denmark. What little investment – public or private – that is left happens nowhere near the welfare hotspots.

Debates about regional growth often stall over parochial jealousies and arguments about who is subsidising whom, yet the reality is nuanced. The South East pays the nation’s bills, but it is a benefit bill. Public investment in economic affairs averaged almost £800 per person per year in London compared to £370 in Yorkshire and the Humber, the East Midlands, and the North East since the new millennium.

This situation suits no one. The South East endlessly subsidises the symptoms of stagnation and receives no thanks from communities emaciated by decline. As a frontline charity from the North East put it:

The working-class pride is gone and people are patronised. They talk about getting their wages when they talk about benefits. They feel infantilised.

Indeed, absurd as it is that a claimant with, for example, a mild mental health condition can receive over £27,000 tax-free on welfare, it is even more absurd that this is more than the net income of approximately six million full-time workers earn in Britain today. For many communities, the gap in earnings between benefits and wages is so blurred that it is unsurprising they name the latter after the former.

Our benefit system needs reform. But, unless good jobs are within reach of every community, reform will only serve to change the shape of dependency, not to end it.