Ben Baumberg Geiger

Health-related inactivity in the UK

There is enormous political and public attention to health-related inactivity and benefits claims in the UK, and I have been doing lots of work around this - commenting on reports for people like the OBR, IFS and Resolution Foundation; giving evidence to various parliamentary committees, speaking to DWP and journalists etc.

Most of my thoughts on this debate - the way that the problem is misreprented through faulty statistics, what the real problem is, and how to resolve it - are presented in a series of blog posts at Inequalities. I've also written a Q&A blog post over at the Conversation, responding to an IFS report. And part of how we respond to this debate is in thinking about disability benefit assessments (see just below), particularly my 2024 report After the WCA.

Disability benefits assessments

The way we assess incapacity (that is, assess if people should receive out-of-work benefits on the grounds of disability) is in chaos. This is partly because of a lack of clarity about exactly what we are trying to assess — the current system does not assess incapacity as most people would understand it.

My work here is split across two projects - an ESRC-funded research project 2014-17, and an update to the 2024 debates, as part of my work in the ESRC Centre for Society & Mental Health. This section summarises the key publications from each project.

After the WCA (2024)

After several near misses, the era of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) may be coming to a close - Labour’s manifesto says that the WCA “needs to be reformed or replaced”. But exactly what comes next? And will it be better than the WCA? Or will we instead decide to replace the WCA with something similar? This report describes best- and worst-case scenarios, and also describes the main points from a discussion of experts in 6th June 2024.

A better WCA is possible (2018)

In a four-year ESRC-funded project 2014-17 (‘Rethinking Incapacity’; ESRC grant ES/K009583/1), I explored what inacpacity might mean, how other countries assess it, and conducted new (qualitative and quantitative) public opinion work to see what disabled people, policy elites and the British public think. I also looked at conditionality and sanctions for disabled people (spurred partly by how this was governed by the assessment process).

This culminated in a (2018) Demos report, where I put all of the evidence together, and put forward a series of recommendations for how a better WCA is possible.

The report is based on a number of my other publications, including:

Assessing work disability for social security benefits: international models for the direct assessment of work capacity (Geiger, 2018)
Benefits conditionality for disabled people: stylised facts from a review of international evidence and practice (Geiger, 2017), alongside an Introduction to the wider special issue on ‘Disability and Conditional Social Security Benefits’ (Geiger, 2017).
An earlier 2015 Demos report Rethinking the WCA, which includes a bit more detail on some of the countries in the international review.
I also wrote a series of blog posts on the project’s blog, Rethinking Incapacity — you can see the highlights here. And I wrote a short summary piece, Disability assessment: a better WCA is possible, based on the 2018 Demos report

The disability employment gap

A common measure of disabled people's inclusion in the labour market is the 'disability employment gap' - my research on this includes (i) studies of how this compares over time and across countries, and (ii) a critique of why this measure can be completely misleading, and how we should measure this better.

My publications include:

A 2025 OECD working paper with Chris Prinz, setting out the problems in ways of looking at the disability employment gap, and how to do it better. You can find the appendices to the report on the OECD website (and also here) - the appendix describes how to use some of the technqiues we suggest in the working paper, which comes alongside some Stata code available here.
The growing American health penalty: International trends in the employment of older workers with poor health (Geiger, Böheim & Leoni 2019). Social Science Research, 82:18–32
Success and failure in narrowing the disability employment gap: comparing levels and trends across Europe 2002–2014 (Geiger, van der Wel & Tøge 2017). BMC Public Health 17:928.
Disability prevalence and disability-related employment gaps in the UK 1998–2012: Different trends in different surveys? (Baumberg, Jones & Wass 2015). Social Science & Medicine 141:72–81.
Self-reported fitness-for-work in Britain: trends and implications (Baumberg 2011). In Vickerstaff,S; Phillipson,C; and Wilkie, R (eds), Work, Health and Well-being: The challenges of managing health at work. Policy Press.

Disability and work

Ever since my PhD, I have been looking at how the nature of work can exclude people with impairments. You can find more on this in the publications tab and filter by disability - key publications include my 2025 Resolution Foundation (with Louise Murphy), the report led by Catherine Hale (also from 2025), my 2015 Social Policy & Administration paper, and my 2014 Journal of Social Policy paper. There's also a book chapter on self-employment there.

Public attitudes to disability benefit claimants

I'm really interested in how people judge disability benefit claimants - particularly the way in which people judge claimants as 'undeserving' or 'not genuine', as this seems to drive a lot of public debate and poliy. You can read more about this in the 'Public attitudes to benefits and claimants' bit of the Benefits tab.

Disability and poverty

I was part of a team (led by Tom MacInnes at the New Policy Institute) that did a 2014 review of disability, impairment and poverty for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

You can find the review here, and it was covered by the Disability News Service with the headline, ‘Official figures ‘underestimate disability poverty by one million people’