The IFS has questioned the link between health-related benefit claims and NHS waiting lists and waiting times.

Think tank the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has questioned the link between health-related benefit claims and NHS waiting lists and waiting times. 

Analysis by IFS researchers using newly constructed data at a local level across England finds no evidence that rising waiting lists for pre-planned hospital treatment have been a major driver of increases in the receipt of health-related benefits by working-age adults since the start of the pandemic.

“Our new analysis very strongly suggests that rising NHS waiting lists for elective hospital treatment have not been a major factor behind recent increases in the number of working-age adults receiving benefits for ill health,” said senior research fellow Max Warner and an author of the report.

“The main explanation for rising benefit claims almost certainly lies elsewhere. Reducing hospital waiting times is a sensible policy objective, not least as it would benefit those who use the NHS – but we shouldn’t necessarily expect it to also deliver a significant reduction in health-related benefit claims. That’s a separate policy nut to crack,” he continued. 

No connection

Local areas that experienced larger increases in NHS waits for elective hospital treatment between 2019 and 2024 did not, on average, experience meaningfully larger increases in disability or incapacity benefit claims. The same is true for areas that experienced larger increases in waiting times for NHS talking therapies. 

There are some signs of a possible relationship between NHS waits and disability benefit claims for mental health and musculoskeletal conditions. 

Taken on face value, the report argues that these (weak) relationships suggest that longer NHS waits could perhaps explain something like 7% of the national increase in benefit claims for those specific conditions – though even that is very likely an overestimate.

Data limitations make it impossible to establish definitively and conclusively whether longer NHS waits have a causal impact on health-related benefit claims, it argues. 

The analysis comes with caveats. But taken as a whole, the results strongly indicate that deteriorating NHS performance – at least as captured by rising NHS waiting lists for elective hospital treatment or for talking therapies – is to blame, at most, for a small fraction of the overall increase in receipt of health-related benefits among working-age individuals in recent years.

The analysis was welcomed by the membership organisation NHS Confederation. 

“The IFS’s analysis provides further evidence of the need for cross-government co-operation, collaboration and investment on health policy, recognising that most policy that impacts people’s health is made outside the NHS,” said director of policy Layla McCay. 

The research was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.