Mr. R?n?n Hession:

That is our expectation, although if the Deputy looks back at the previous five years and as described in the Green Paper, we have seen a significant jump in numbers across all disability schemes, including carer’s payments. Some of that has had to do with demographics, including a larger population more generally. We have conducted a number of analyses of the mix. To give the committee a sense of the situation, there were 140,000 people in receipt of disability allowance in 2018, which is not all that long ago. There are now approximately 161,000. The number of people on invalidity pension has stayed stable, as has the number of people on partial capacity benefit and the blind pension. The number of people on the DCA, which is a payment to parents of children aged under 16 years, has increased significantly. I do not know if my team has a note for the figures going back over a longer period.

A number of factors are behind these increases, including demographics. Approximately half of the increased number of people in receipt of DCA are also on disability allowance. Ten or so years ago, there was a policy change whereby illness benefit was limited to two years, after which people went onto disability allowance. If we were to extrapolate the disability allowance curve under the Green Paper, we expect it would look broadly similar as under today’s rules, albeit with a higher cost.