One of the more unexpected aspects of the prime minister’s performance in recent months is that he seems to find much more success in negotiating with the likes of tricky characters such as Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron than he does with his own backbenchers.
Many of them, he must reflect, owe their seats in the House of Commons to his Herculean efforts to make the Labour Party electable again after the debacle in 2019. There was nothing preordained about the landslide last July, even if the Conservatives did all they could, inadvertently, to ease Labour back into power after a 14-year wait.
That so many Labour MPs now seem to yearn for the kind of policies Jeremy Corbyn fought and lost on can only be a cause for dismay for Sir Keir Starmer and his closest advisers. In its century and a quarter of existence, Sir Keir is only the fourth leader of his party to have ever won an overall majority. Attlee, Wilson, Blair, Starmer; this is an instructively small club. Politics is indeed an ungrateful business.
At this juncture, the prime minister might be well advised to reach for Occam’s razor, whereby the simplest explanation is often the best. The range of political options, policy adjustments and permutations of possible parliamentary outcomes as the vote on the welfare bill approaches is dizzyingly complex. The chances of success are vanishingly thin. There is simply insufficient time to recast the reforms in such a way that would preserve the best intentions of policy, deliver the savings needed by the Treasury, and secure the support of an increasingly febrile parliamentary party.
The good news for Sir Keir and his colleagues is that, when treated as an objective policy challenge, the path ahead is more straightforward. The obvious mistake made by ministers since they took office is that reform of social security also became an exercise in “tough”, performative politics, and a crude if not panicky way for the Treasury to cut public spending.
The Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill was rushed to meet unrealistic fiscal deadlines set by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves (as with some of her other policies), and, for want of a better word, botched. With such a hurried timetable for such a sensitive set of changes affecting vulnerable people, it is little wonder that Liz Kendall, the work and pensions secretary, was unable to win the arguments. A pause is essential, and inevitable.
What is to be done? Just as the “reasoned amendment” put forward by more than 120 Labour MPs suggests, the first thing the government must do is complete the essential work that should have been done before bringing the bill to parliament. That means the consultations with groups representing people with disabilities must be properly completed and taken into account.
We already know that, on the government’s own estimations, some 250,000 people will be pushed into poverty, and that seems very much at odds with the declared intentions of the changes – to improve the living standards of people with disabilities by getting them into the good jobs so many of them want.
Will the reforms do that? We do not know.
MPs, and the public, are waiting for the Office for Budget Responsibility to publish its impact assessment on the employment prospects of those affected, with the improved job-finding support and the “right to try” safeguards in place, alongside the alterations in the criteria for personal independence payments (PIP).
If, as the Cabinet Office minister Pat McFadden attests, more than 1,000 people a day go on to PIP, why is that so high? Why have economic inactivity rates not recovered to pre-Covid levels? Conjecture, surmise and speculation are a poor basis for policy.
This might also therefore be a moment for an overhaul of the points-based system for assessing people’s needs. The mathematical nature of such tests feels insensitive and deeply impersonal, and may take insufficient account of individual circumstances. There should be a better, more dignified, more holistic way of working out need than “scoring” a person according, for example, on whether they can wash their whole body themselves (zero points), need “supervision” (two points), assistance for lower body (two points), upper body (four points) or whole body (eight points).
There should also be an objective review of how far mental health is being “over-diagnosed” and affecting the numbers claiming benefits. Some, such as Nigel Farage and the health secretary, Wes Streeting, opine that that is the case – but there seems inadequate data to draw a firm conclusion.
It would also help the credibility of the reforms if the government had organised time-limited but full pilot schemes under the new arrangements in one or two regions of the country. Under the DWP’s Pathways to Work programme, there have been such trials and work coaches and specialist one-to-one help have proved successful – but there’s no evidence or research to back the argument that the proposed reforms to benefit eligibility will indeed produce better outcomes. That is why the Labour MPs are left unpersuaded.
Britain is a parliamentary democracy. Backbench MPs are not AI-driven automatons whose only role is to unconditionally back the party leadership. When they are asked to do so, an appeal to loyalty and the horrors of the opposition (“Prime Minister Farage”) are perfectly legitimate. But members of parliament are also entitled to have evidence-based, well-developed policy before they are asked to approve it.
The public is also right to expect that, and parliament has an obligation to respect the needs and vulnerabilities of those subjected to fairly sudden changes in their personal finances – in this case, people with extremely varied disabilities.
If there is to be a Commons vote on welfare reform next week, then the bill would need to be gutted, taking out the contentious, under-researched provisions on eligibility, and leaving only the useful and proven new schemes that are likely to help people into work, where it is available.
It’s a rare opportunity to get social security reform right – and for it to command the wide public support needed as spending on an ageing population increases the cost. Delaying welfare reform is better than bad welfare reform.
