Unemployed benefits claimants outnumber actual workers in thousands of British neighbourhoods, analysis shows.
The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has identified 3,000 ‘welfare hotspots’ across England and Wales, where at least half of working-age people are claiming out-of-work benefits.
More than 150 neighbourhoods even had rates that exceeded 80 per cent.
Former Conservative leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith said the figures show unemployment has ‘gradually become accepted as a fact of life since the pandemic’.
Sir Iain said: ‘Britain is now living with levels of worklessness that would once have been treated as a national emergency.
‘Yet because much of that worklessness is recorded as
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