The Government is “eerily silent” on tackling the issue of people absent from the labour market due to mental health issues, shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride has said.

He told Times Radio: “There is an issue, particularly actually around mental health, and particularly around younger people.

“Now that’s why, when I was the secretary of state and in government, I brought in fundamental reforms around something called the work capability assessment, which is the gateway into these benefits, to put the emphasis on helping people, particularly into employment, rather than consigning them to going on to benefits for the very long term.

“And what the OBR (Office for Budget Responsibility) said was that would reduce the numbers going on to those benefits by over 400,000 people. So there are things you can do, but it takes a bit of time, and it takes a lot of political will.

“My concern is that this Government said absolutely nothing about the reforms that I brought through, and if they do absolutely nothing, then the costs, for example, to the taxpayer, can continue to spiral ever upwards.

“Now, in the context of the kind of public finance pressures that we all know that we have, and this talk about tax rises and what’s coming up in the budget, it would be a complete dereliction of duty for this government to simply ignore these things, and at the moment, they are eerily silent on them.”