Up to 70 per cent of working-age adults are claiming jobless benefits in parts of England and Wales.
Shocking figures laying bare the scale of the crisis Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to tackle, suggest Stockton and Portrack is the capital of worklessness.
More than 3,000 of the 4,300 adults aged between 16-64 living in the neighbourhood of Stockton-on-Tees are in receipt of Universal Credit or similar.
This includes 12 per cent getting incapacity benefits, according to analysis of Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and Office for National Statistics (ONS) data.
Byker East, a district in Newcastle, is the number two benefit hotspot.
Sixty-four per cent of working-age adults there claim UC or other benefits, with 13 per cent of those on sickness credits, such as Employment and Support Allowance (ESA).
Our audit comes after Sir Keir declared war on benefits Britain to try to tame the £137billion welfare bill.
In a column for the Mail on Sunday, the Prime Minister promised ‘sweeping changes’.
He said this would include a blitz on cheats and those who ‘game the system’.
Currently 9.25million Brits are neither in a job or looking for one – equating to more than a fifth of the working-age population. It includes a near-record figure for those signed off with long-term sickness.
Channel 4’s Dispatches this week shone a light onto the topic, naming an area of seaside town Grimsby as Britain’s worklessness capital.
In its own analysis of Government figures, it said 53 per cent of people in the East Marsh and Port area of the Lincolnshire seaside town were on welfare benefits in the first quarter of 2024.
‘s audit uncovered similar levels of benefits being doled out in the same district.
Grimsby East Marsh and Port, in North East Lincolnshire, ranked sixth in our table of 7,000-plus suburbs of England and Wales, with a jobless benefit rate of 54 per cent.
Our investigation involved analysing DWP data on the number of working-aging people who claim out-of-work and related sickness benefits in around 7,200 areas with an average population of 5,200.
We then compared these figures with the ONS’s latest estimates of the working age (16 to 64) population in these areas to calculate the percentage of these people on jobless and sickness benefits.
Victoria Park, a neighbourhood of Plymouth, ranked third, with 60 per cent of working-age adults claiming out-of-work payments.
Greet and Mid Sparkhill, Birmingham (56 per cent) and Barkerend West and Little Germany, Bradford (just less than 56 per cent) rounded out ‘s top five.
The £137bn bill for benefits for working-age people includes £90bn for disability and £35bn for housing benefit.
A further £166bn is paid to pensioners, taking the Government’s total social security expenditure to £303bn, which is nearly 11 per cent of the country’s GDP.
The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has found that overall spending on sickness and disability benefits will top £100bn annually by 2030.
A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said: ‘We’ve inherited a spiralling benefits bill with millions of people with a long-term illness or disability out of work and not getting the support they need.
‘We’re determined to fix this, and through our Get Britain Working White Paper we’ll ensure the system is better supporting people to get them into and stay in work – and crucially, bring down the benefits bill.’
Labour’s plans include giving the NHS a role in getting people back to work, such as employing tens of thousands of people who are economically inactive for health reasons in non-clinical roles.