Bhen Keir Starmer was just the humble opposition leader, he made “Band-Aid politics” one of his themes. It was a criticism of the way Westminster tends to focus intensely on something for a short time, then drift on to the next crisis, solving nothing. It made a lot of sense for Starmer to complain about short-termism in politics: the Tories hopped from one problem to the next, and besides, every opposition leader likes to make dignified comments about failed policies from the comfortable distance of not being in power and having to fix them. Well, now he’s in power, he faces every temptation to leave the Band-Aids firmly in place.

No department is a better example of what happens when you take a Band-Aid approach than the Department for Work and Pensions. It is responding to failures elsewhere: long-term illness caused by even longer NHS waiting lists, insecure employment and skills shortages. When the health service does not treat people in time, they lose their jobs, often worsening their problems and quality of life. When the Treasury does not create the conditions for economic growth, the cost of unemployment benefits remains high. When education and business do not ensure workers have the skills that will persuade their bosses to hire them rather than recruiting overseas, the department foots the bill. One Labour figure describes it as “the bucket into which all the failings of other departments are poured”.

At the moment, that’s a very big bucket: 2.8 million people are unemployed due to long-term illness. That’s expensive too. The cost of services to support people with disability or chronic illness (including those who are working) is forecast to rise by £10.6 billion to £79.6 billion by 2028/29. Youth unemployment is becoming a particular problem. The number of young people classified as economically inactive – meaning not in work or looking for one – has risen by 245,000 year-on-year, reaching 2.99 million in April-June 2024.

Shortly before the election, the Conservatives made headline-grabbing announcements about tackling what Rishi Sunak called “sick leave culture”. But the timing suggested the then Prime Minister was more interested in campaigning than in solving the problem. Now it’s up to Labour.

Welfare was already one of the autumn’s big political battlegrounds, with a White Paper on getting people back into work due to be published. But the riots have underlined the importance of the issue: the worst riots have tended to take place in cities where unemployment is high and is now about the same as it was in 2011. After those riots 13 years ago, much of the political attention focused on dealing with “problem families” rather than the difficult problem of long-term unemployment. Politicians who wanted to offer more than a Band-Aid, such as Iain Duncan Smith, saw their reforms ultimately thwarted by tightwads in the Treasury like George Osborne, who kept chipping away at the initial investment the welfare system needed to get people back into work and off expensive benefits.

We are coming to the end of the relatively easy part of this government’s response to these riots, namely the swift justice of those involved in the riots. Courts have been quick to hear riot cases and have broadcast the verdicts live. This seems to have worked well as a deterrent to anyone immediately thinking about running amok, but the underlying problems are the same.

Governments do not make policies of short-term purpose, as Starmer argues. Social policy is – and should be, given its subject matter – extremely complex and emotive. Even if you announce something that you really want to work, and not just as an election campaign tool, it is very easy to get it wrong, have disastrous unintended consequences, or simply do nothing except cost a lot of money. The Tories know this, and Labour knows this too, because both have struggled with welfare reform despite thinking long-term.

Both parties have their mental stumbling blocks. It has always been tempting for the Tories to use benefits as a tool rather than a political issue. Nerds versus slackers, ‘sick leave culture’, all these things are good talking points but have nothing to do with reality. Labour finds the issue extremely emotive and must always weigh up its policies against what its own party will go through. Neither mindset really recognises this bucket problem, though: if the DWP is a department largely responsible for the failings of other departments, then changing benefits policy is not going to be the answer to the Benefits Bill.

The approach so far has been for politicians to openly consider whether people with mental illness are really too ill to work, or whether introducing more sanctions would force lazy people to look for a job. But this type of corrective action does not address the health problems themselves, nor does it improve skills and employability, or even job opportunities.

Alan Milburn, a former Labour health minister now involved in the new government, made this point in his recent report to Barnsley council on pathways into work. He argued that policymakers had largely relied on tightening the benefits system to solve this “health-related problem”. He presented this report earlier this summer to Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall, who saw it as an example of how local areas are much better at identifying their own employment problems than her own centralised department. She wants to transform the DWP from an administrative department for social care into a department for jobs. At the same time, Health Secretary Wes Streeting has declared his own department to be a “department for economic growth”. The two work closely together.

They can rename their ministries all they like, but nothing will really change unless the Treasury is prepared to provide the seed money for the reforms both sides need to get people back into work. The last Labour government pumped too much money into the NHS too quickly, and it’s definitely not the case that all the problems in today’s health service can be solved with more money. But some problems are actually caused by underinvestment, particularly in mental health care. A government cannot talk about people having to keep their part of the social contract by going to work when they can, if it is breaking its own part of that agreement by failing to offer them appropriate and timely treatment. When Sunak announced that too many people were on sick leave when they shouldn’t be, he failed to acknowledge that most of them were OK with that, waiting for the therapy they needed to deal with perfectly treatable but nonetheless debilitating illnesses. That costs money up front.

Spending now to save later is not an argument the Treasury has liked to hear in the past. It is an argument often put to it and frequently ignored, not least because the figures describing the actual saving are a little dubious. Labour ministers today insist that Rachel Reeves does not have that instinctive distrust of upfront investment to cut later spending. If that is true, then she will be a very remarkable Treasury Secretary. But she is also looking for early savings in welfare spending because it is one of the few unprotected big spending pots that can be nibbled at without triggering a serious row with the public.

She may understand the long-term argument for welfare savings from a functioning NHS, a modern education system and businesses that do not rely on foreign workers. But she needs the savings now, not at the end of major reforms in these areas. And so the temptation for further laudable measures is still enormous, whatever Starmer may have argued in opposition. If he and the Chancellor of the Exchequer give in, the DWP will need an even bigger bucket.