Birmingham might tussle with Manchester for the title of Britain’s second city, but Brum indisputably tops the chart for UK benefits spending.

According to new TaxPayers’ Alliance analysis, over 210,000 Brummie households claim Universal Credit, amounting to a £2.3 billion a year. Almost 100,000 residents of the city claim around £720 million on PIP, with a similar figure spent on housing benefit. Benefits spending across the UK has shot up £18.8 billion year on year to a massive £329.1 billion across 2025-26, driven by pensioner payouts, working-age claimants and rising disability benefits. But Birmingham is the worst offender.

That the city’s welfare spending is so high reflects its worklessness and a lack of highly-paid opportunities. The highest density of Neets — those aged 16-24 who are not in training, employment or education — can be found in the deprived Birmingham ward of Erdington. Yet the city has the second-highest national rate of working-age adults on out-of-work benefits. Evidently, this is not just a problem involving young people.

Part of the issue is the lack of opportunities, with Birmingham’s job density four points below the national average. The city has fewer degree holders than the national average and more low-wage elementary positions — 12.6% compared to a 9.1% UK average. A list of the sectors which employ the most people in Birmingham includes areas such as retail and health and social care where precarity, under-employment and low pay are rife. It’s no wonder that Universal Credit is topping up pay.

Even where Birmingham offers jobs that shouldn’t require a benefits top-up — Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) and Aston Martin are large employers, and the city has a long history of being an advanced manufacturing center — current job security is being hit by US tariffs, cut-price global competition (particularly China), and geopolitical uncertainty. Last month, for instance, JLR announced 4,000 job cuts.

Many of the factors that prop up Birmingham’s huge benefits bill are hardly of the city’s own making. Long-term deindustrialization, the growth of precarious work, and a decline in UK health since 2008 didn’t originate in the Midlands. But they do have an outsized impact there, due to the base metals of the region’s makeup. The West Midlands is the second-most obese region in the UK, a critical factor in the rising ill health which drives disability benefits, while its reliance on the automobile industry has not produced higher salaries.

The problem goes wider, though, and the Government is taking note. The Milburn Review into youth worklessness and the Keep Britain Working Review, both published earlier this year, are the latest efforts at proactively reducing a benefits bill where Birmingham makes up a massive part of the total.

But Britain, and its supposed second city, clearly needs more than attendant bureaucratic exercises in diagnosing the issues. To wean a country off welfare requires good jobs, with progression and support. Anything else is a sticking plaster. Otherwise, Birmingham may wind up being the canary in the coal mine: a city where worklessness and welfare payments are rife, and where poor health and poor pay take center stage. That should be a warning to the Labour government to turbocharge past reviews into solutions.