Nearly a third of people claiming 'sicknote' benefits have been doing so for more than a decade, new figures showed yesterday.
More than 800,000 people have been paid Incapacity Benefit or similar state handouts for illness for more than ten years.
They make up over 30 per cent of the 2.64 million people who live on the state sick note payment most often blamed for keeping millions of families mired in benefit dependency.
People who say they are unemployed and claim Jobseekers' Allowance get less money than those who claim sickness benefits
The new details of how hundreds of thousands appear to have backed away from any possibility of returning to work throw fresh light on the way Incapacity Benefit has replaced unemployment benefits as the real measure of worklessness.
People who say they are unemployed and claim Jobseekers' Allowance get less money than those who claim sickness benefits, and come under pressure to find work.
Reforms to Incapacity Benefit this autumn are intended to introduce checks on how sick or disabled claimants really are, and to find out what kinds of work they may be fit for. But they will apply only to new claimants and are expected to take no more than 20,000 people a year off the benefit lists.
Tory Work and Pensions spokesman Chris Grayling, who obtained the new figures, said: 'Sometimes you have to wonder what the point of a Labour Government has been.
'Despite all the grandiose promises and the billions of pounds that have been spent, they have delivered virtually no improvement for the most vulnerable in our society.'
Numbers claiming sickness benefits exploded in the 1980s when old heavy industries suffered heavy closures in the north of England and Wales. But numbers of claimants have declined by only a hundred thousand over the past decade and half a million people aged under 35 now live on the hand outs.
High proportions of claimants say they suffer from bad backs, which are notoriously difficult for doctors to disprove, and growing numbers claim for stress. More than 100,000 are on sickness benefits because they are too ill to work because of their heavy use of alcohol or drugs.
The new figures show that 806,630 claimants have been on Incapacity Benefit for more than 10 years.
Earlier this year MPs of the Public Accounts Committee said that a majority of claimants - six out of ten - have been taking the handout for more than five years.
Incapacity Benefit is considered one of the key reasons why six million people in Britain live in homes where no-one has a job. They make up nearly one in six of all households.
The figures showed most of those claiming for more than a decade were in the North West, where there were more than 130,000 long-term claimants.
Of the top 10 constituencies for the highest percentage of people claiming incapacity benefit for more than a decade, five were from the North West.
But the worst-hit constituency was the former coal mining town of Easington in the North East, where 42 per cent of incapacity benefit claimants have been on the handout for more than 10 years.
Welsh constituency Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney and the North West's Wirral South were also badly affected, with 41 per cent and 40 per cent respectively.
The cost of Incapacity Benefit to the taxpayer is now calculated to run at ?16 billion a year - an amount that compares with the ?10 billion cost of the 2012 Olympics.
The figure includes the cost of Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit that can be claimed by anyone who has successfully claimed IB.
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