The Times corrects benefits and mental health claims in ‘lost generation’ warning

The Times has amended a prominent article warning of a “lost generation on benefits” after correcting two factual claims that materially shaped how the problem was framed.

The original report, built around comments from Alan Milburn in his role as the government’s work tsar, argued that large numbers of young people were being funnelled from special educational needs support into long-term welfare dependency. Central to that case was the assertion that children receiving special educational needs support typically receive child disability allowance, creating an almost automatic pathway into adult disability benefits. The correction clarifies that while the majority of children with formal education, health and care plans do receive child disability allowance, this is not true across all children receiving Send support. The original wording overstated how universal that progression is.

The article also relied on a striking statistic to normalise mental ill health, stating that eighty-three percent of the adult population could be classified as having a mental health condition at any one time. That claim has now been corrected. The figure refers to the proportion of people who will experience a mental health condition at some point in their lives, not concurrently. The difference is substantial. Framed as a point-in-time prevalence, the statistic suggested near universality, reinforcing the argument that anxiety and depression are so widespread as to be almost meaningless as markers of work incapacity. Corrected, it instead describes lifetime incidence, a far less radical proposition.

Both errors matter because the article was not a neutral policy explainer but an intervention in an active political debate about welfare reform, youth unemployment and the legitimacy of disability claims. Overstating the reach of disability benefits within special needs education and inflating the apparent prevalence of mental health conditions sharpened the sense of systemic failure and moral urgency. They made the pipeline into benefits appear more automatic and the diagnostic threshold for mental illness more expansive than the evidence supports.

As with many such amendments, the correction appears at the foot of the article, after the argument has already done its work. Readers encountering the original version would reasonably have come away with a more deterministic picture of how young people move from school into welfare, and a more sweeping claim about the normalisation of mental illness, than the corrected facts justify. The narrative survives, but its empirical foundations are narrower than first presented.