Online video tutorials helping people game the benefits system are illustrative of everything wrong with welfare in Britain - Andrew Vine

They spell out in detail answers to the questions claimants will be asked, and the medical conditions they need to cite in order to receive the most money.

They’re popular too – a couple on YouTube have been viewed more than 100,000 times, and appreciative comments have been left by people who have presumably followed the advice and are better off as a result.

These are brazen tutorials on how to game the system and become a successful scrounger – and it is not just the amateurs filming themselves on their phones who are promoting what amounts to a massive exercise in fraud.

Delve a little deeper and you quickly turn up adverts from medical practices offering supporting letters for benefits claims – in exchange for a fee, of course – after an online consultation.

Pity the poor staff at the Department for Work and Pensions who are deluged with the applications that result. Even if they suspect the claimants are not genuine, how do they possibly challenge forms on which all the right boxes are ticked, supported by an authoritative-looking letter?

One reason this blatant cheating should make any honest taxpayer’s blood boil is that those who work hard and pay what the state demands of them are now in a minority.

The ballooning growth of the benefits bill in Britain under successive governments has left us in a position where 53 per cent of the working age population take more out of the state than they pay in, leaving the remaining 47 per cent to foot the bill with their income tax and national insurance.

This is an obviously unsustainable state of affairs which is only going to grow more serious as the population ages and retires from the workforce. It may even get very rapidly worse if artificial intelligence dumps massive numbers of people out of work.

Those people will be in genuine need of state support if AI destroys their livelihoods, which means there has to be an honest conversation about the welfare system and a determination to root out those who are abusing it.

Yet last week’s government-commissioned report into the disability welfare system proved predictably coy about decisive action to address the benefits culture.

It found the system “unfit for purpose”. More seriously, it discourages people from working. In that respect, it has a lot in common with all those YouTube videos.

But the review by Disability Minister Sir Stephen Timms hadn’t much to say on what do about the problems, despite acknowledging the bill will spiral to £41bn a year by the end of the decade, that public confidence in the welfare system is crumbling and the fastest-growing group of new claimants are those aged 16 to 19.

It also avoided the issue of fraudulent claims, which perhaps isn’t surprising given his study was commissioned after last year’s revolt by Labour MPs over trimming the benefit bill by a relatively modest £5bn, forcing a government U-turn that was an important factor in fatally undermining Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership.

We’ll have to wait until the autumn for Sir Stephen’s recommendations on reforming the system. Let’s hope the delay isn’t the start of benefits being handled as gingerly as funding social care, with successive reports kicking the issue down the road because it’s just too difficult.

Even if that isn’t the case, the government’s track record doesn’t inspire confidence that the problem is going to be gripped firmly enough, ensuring benefits are only paid to those deserving of them, not being coached into gaming the system.

Incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnham has already said he is not “squeamish” about reform, but will not countenance “crude” cuts, which suggest that he’s wary of offending the same backbenchers who humiliated Sir Keir.

But it is an issue that has to be tackled, and quickly, if the country is not to be bankrupted by an ever-growing welfare bill paid for by a shrinking workforce.

It also needs to be addressed for the sake of the young people embarking on a life of benefits. It defies belief that vast numbers of young Britons aged 16 to 19, who ought to be full of vigour for life and keen to embark on a bright future, are unique in Europe in being too ill to do any sort of work.