An ADHD diagnosis must not become a gateway to a lifetime on benefits, welfare review warns

From the Newshound archive · first published 25 September 2026.

Professor Peter Fonagy's landmark review is set to reject claims that Britain is in the grip of mass overdiagnosis of ADHD and autism, affirming both conditions as genuine — yet policy analysts argue the welfare system has failed to keep pace. The number of working-age people claiming disability or incapacity benefits has climbed 62 per cent since 2019, a rise driven increasingly by young people with mental-health and neurodevelopmental conditions. A diagnosis has come to serve as grounds for leaving work entirely rather than a means of staying in it.

Fonagy's review will conclude that most people seeking a diagnosis face real difficulties, even where pockets of overdiagnosis exist.

One in four people now has a common mental-health or neurodevelopmental condition — a prevalence that lays bare how ill-suited the current binary approach to work capability assessments has become.

Decades of evidence suggest that good work tends to benefit health, yet the welfare system is increasingly treating ill health as automatic justification for removing people from employment altogether.