Scope
As of May 2011 there were 2.6m people of working age in Britain claiming Incapacity Benefit, at an annual cost to the tax payer of £12.5 billion. The total annual budget of the Department for Work and Pensions in 2011-12 is £151.6 billion, representing approximately 28% of total UK Government spending.
The 2.6m claimant count represents approximately 8.5% of the total adult workforce in the United Kingdom of around 30.1m individuals. Of those claiming Incapacity Benefit, around a quarter of a million were unable to work due to mental illness.
Read more about this topic: Incapacity Benefit
Famous quotes containing the word scope:
“As the creative adult needs to toy with ideas, the child, to form his ideas, needs toys—and plenty of leisure and scope to play with them as he likes, and not just the way adults think proper. This is why he must be given this freedom for his play to be successful and truly serve him well.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)
“For it is not the bare words but the scope of the writer that gives the true light, by which any writing is to be interpreted; and they that insist upon single texts, without considering the main design, can derive no thing from them clearly.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)
“A country survives its legislation. That truth should not comfort the conservative nor depress the radical. For it means that public policy can enlarge its scope and increase its audacity, can try big experiments without trembling too much over the result. This nation could enter upon the most radical experiments and could afford to fail in them.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)