So it's all "treat the symptoms" rather than addressing what has changed in society, economy and culture to produce such increases?

Rapacious companies that inexhaustibly need more so your boss, or his, or theirs or the shareholders can buy another yacht?

Cost of living where many have given up on achieving what their parents did because the rigged game is so transparent?

Redistribution of wealth(through actual reasonable wages not poverty margins) and meritocracy in economy, mandatory flexible work arrangements, would be a good combination of starts for many.

I'm American and reading this, we have all the same ills--only most of us can't take time off to be sick with any pay beyond 40 hours per year...and thats in the "progressive states". Granted a few have state paid leaves now, like 5/50, and it's real progress in the last few years but we are so far behind. hope things get bad enough the government actually starts turning over the right rocks finally.

The IFS’s deep dive on the claimant statistics reveals that claimants were younger and their claims increasingly focused on mental health. New awards made to under-40s more than doubled from 4,500 a month before the pandemic to 11,500 last year. Over the same time period, the percentage of all new awards primarily for mental health conditions went from 28% to 37%, an increase from 3,900 claims a month to 12,100 a month.

Anecdotally I saw a lot more mental health issues emerge in the children I know who were going through secondary school during lockdown and a lot are either now at university (or planning on which to go to) or have recently graduated.

That's your ticking time bomb and needs to be addressed ASAP. Fiddling with benefits or introducing changes in the workplace or job centre seem like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. What they need is faster access to better quality health care. Every example I know of involved a long fight to get a diagnosis and in most cases their treatment under CAMHS was inadequate (they got more help at university). So if the government want to invest to improve the lives of younger people then this is where it is needed.

And could this same generation also be at the sharp end of the explosion of AI replacing a wide set of entry-level jobs - in call centres, retail, law, the financial and creative industries and much more. Britain’s biggest corporations are racing to implement effective AI solutions to handle everything from customer service to their marketing output.

These transformations are happening more quickly than had been expected, affecting everyone from entry level front-line workers through to highly skilled professionals such as art workers, media planners and legal clerks. It will inevitably become a significant reality - perhaps the defining social and economic change over the course of this Parliament.

And that seems like the elephant in the room. Call centres in particular are going to be hammered (as will fulfillment centres) and a lot were established in areas hit by the collapse of mining or heavy industry. When they go, there will be nothing left in those communities.

Completely ignoring the impact of long covid. The whole article feels like another government propaganda hit job.