We need to get back to the belief that work is good for you, says Mel Stride

Britain needs to get back to the “old-fashioned belief” that “work is good for you”, Mel Stride has said.

The Work and Pensions Secretary said the UK needed to have a “grown-up and sensible conversation” about mental health if it is to avoid a spiralling benefits bill.

He told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme that he wanted to “break the cycle” of people feeling “a bit depressed” and then ending up not working.

Mr Stride also said that too often we “label or medicalise” conditions which in the past were seen as “the ups-and-downs of life”.

It comes three weeks after he told The Telegraph that Britain’s approach to mental health was in danger of having “gone too far”.

Mr Stride told the BBC: “At the heart of the approach that I’m taking – perhaps it’s an old-fashioned belief, but I think it’s one that needs to come back into fashion – is that work is good for you.

“Work is good for your mental health. Getting up in the morning, having a sense of purpose, interacting with other people in the workplace, having that conversation by the watercooler or whatever it may be, is good for our mental health and there is plenty of evidence that shows that.

“My mission is to get as many people into work as possible, and I care the most about those who can benefit from work in the way that I’ve described.”

There is growing alarm at the size of the welfare bill, which is forecast to hit £100 million this year.

The increasing cost of worklessness is being fuelled by a sharp rise in the number of people, especially the young, who are on long-term sickness payments for mental health conditions.

He added: “I think what we need to be having is a grown-up and sensible conversation about where we are going with mental health.

“It is very good news that we are more open about discussing mental health. There are far too many people who suffered in silence in the past.

“However, I think we also need to look very carefully about whether we are beginning to label or medicalise conditions that in the past would have been seen as the ups-and-downs of life.

“We all go through difficult times in our life. That is regrettable but it is a natural part of the human condition.

“None of that is to suggest that there aren’t additional pressures that have contributed to mental health problems – Covid, lockdown and I would add particularly for young people social media and the impact of that.”

He added: “We can’t leave things as they are. I worry about that person who’s feeling a bit depressed, a bit down, there’s been an event in their life that’s caused that – they drop out of the workforce, they end up not working for months … I want to break that cycle.”