Disability and sickness-related benefit claims

FOI reference: FOI-2025-2711

You asked

Please provide trends in:

• disability and sickness-related benefit claims due to mental health
• breakdown of long-term mental health-related economic activity

Time frame: between January 2023 to present.

Broken down where possible daily, by ethnicity, and by Middle Super Output Area in Birmingham (or alternative indication of geographical location in Birmingham).

We said

Thank you for your query regarding the labour market in Birmingham.

We do not hold data relating to numbers of benefit claimants on different types of disability or sickness benefits. This data is owned and published by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as part of their suite of benefit statistics. If you contact the team responsible for those statistics benefits.statistics@dwp.gov.uk, they may be able to help you further.

We produce labour market estimates for local areas from the Annual Population Survey, based on interviews with people resident in households in the UK.

Due to small sample sizes we do not routinely create estimates for geographies as granular as Middle Super Output Area (MSOA) level from the survey. In the case of Birmingham, Parliamentary Constituencies, which are produced, are the most detailed geographic breakdown.

From the survey we produce estimates of the numbers who of people aged 16 to 64 who are disabled and the numbers of economically active who are disabled.

As an annual survey, the APS produces estimates for 12-month periods. Therefore, we do not hold daily information.

The associated download includes estimates of the disability rates and disabled economically active rates for Birmingham and Parliamentary Constituencies within Birmingham for periods from April 2022 to March 2023 until October 2023 to September 2024. The estimates have all been taken from our Nomis website, where we publish a range of local statistics, particularly pertaining to the labour market.

Unfortunately, we have not created this analysis broken down by ethnicity. This is because the sample sizes used for the APS would make the estimates of this granularity unreliable.