One of the perils of being a PM is all the foreign junkets … the Nato meetings, the G7 get-togethers, the one-to-ones with Donald Trump. It’s part of the job of course, but it can present the incumbent with some awful dilemmas: which would you rather…attend a glamorous summit about international security at The Hague along with other world leaders, or try to sort out the gritty stuff about whether Personal Independence Payments should cover people who have difficulty pulling on their trousers? Tough, huh?
And it’s the remoteness of Sir Keir which has meant that quite a lot of the flak from disgruntled Labour backbenchers has instead been deflected onto Morgan McSweeney, his clever Irish sidekick. Now that Labour MPs have got over their excitement at decriminalising abortion by mothers up to birth and legalising state-funded suicide last week – issues that were arguably tangential to the country’s more pressing problems – they’re now up for defeating the Government’s own bid to cut the burgeoning welfare bill on Tuesday.
It's coming up for the first anniversary next week of Labour’s astonishing election victory, but it’s not exactly a party atmosphere is it? If you have a majority of over 150 and yet 120 backbenchers have signed a motion dissenting from your fundamental reforms to the welfare bill, it doesn’t look as if that massive majority is quite how it looked this time last year.
And many of the rebels don’t have much to lose; they’re more scared of their constituents and of Reform snapping at their heels than of Morgan McSweeney. Compare and contrast with the situation of Tony Blair in 1997 when it was all glad confident morning. He wasn’t any more keen on getting to grips with individual backbenchers than Sir Keir is and was notorious for his proclivity for sofa government, but his administration had an undeniable vim and sense of direction; not least thanks to Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson. Sir Keir lacks almost every attribute of Tony Blair, other than them both being lawyers.
The dissident backbenchers are very willing to declare that they simply will not abide pushing vulnerable people into poverty, less keen on specifying exactly how they would cut the welfare bill themselves. And that bill is almost imaginably large; by 2030, one pound in four raised by income tax will be spent on health and disability benefits…that’s more than defence. 750,000 people will have joined the claimants in that time.
Admittedly some of the proposed changes are weirdly pernickety: claimants for Personal Independence Payments are calculated on points, and an individual who needs help washing their hair or their body below the waist would no longer get the necessary points, but those needing help washing between the shoulders and waist would. It seems like a bizarrely complicated equation, incentivising mendacity. People with arthritis and heart disease will be affected, rather than the burgeoning numbers suffering from anxiety.
Claims based on depression and anxiety have trebled since Covid
But the current proposals are simply limiting the rate of increase in the welfare spending. As a result of the changes overall, incapacity benefit is set to be reduced by half in cash terms for new claimants from April 2026. For existing claimants, it won’t go up in cash terms until 2029-30. The government estimates these two changes will save £3bn a year by 2030. Changes to Personal Independence Payments would, it is estimated, will save an additional £4.5bn a year by 2030.
Sounds impressive? It’s not, given the scale of the problem. According to the Government’s own figures, at the beginning of this year, there were 7.5 million people on Universal Credit. And crucially, there were 3.7 million claims with entitlement to Personal Independence Payment (PIP) in the UK. This is an increase from 2.05 million in 2019. Does anyone – but anyone – seriously believe that in six years, 1.5 million people became seriously ill, to the point where they couldn’t actually work?
I say no. Rather, the pandemic introduced the entire population to the agreeable concept that you could stay at home and be paid for it; people also discovered the hugely elastic concept of mental health – whereby, if you feel to stressed to go to work, or you self-assess yourself for ADHD, you can qualify for benefits on the same basis as a physical disability, but usefully, far less challengeably. Claims based on depression and anxiety have trebled since Covid. The majority of new claims are now for mental health issues – including those of many young people.
It is there, I suggest, that the Government should focus its reforms. The Centre for Social Justice has proposed that one million people with “mild” mental health conditions be barred from claiming benefits and offered treatment instead. Removing most people with disorders such as anxiety and depression from the welfare system would, it says, save £9billion and improve their chances of finding work. It also recommends investing £1 billion in treatments to help those with mental health conditions back to work. Kemi Badenoch has backed the proposal, and so too should Liz Kendall, the embattled Work and Pensions Secretary. In fact, I would set the bar high for any mental health claims whatever and do away with the self-assessment element.
Almost certainly the Labour rebels would find this unacceptable too. But can they just get their heads round the consequences of not dealing with the crisis? If we’re going to spend a quarter of the tax take on welfare there is going to be less money available for local councils – funded by central government more than council tax – on children with special educational needs, on local libraries, on care for the elderly in their homes, on the arts, let alone increased defence spending.
The rebels who are threatening to vote down the Government on Tuesday should ask whether they really put welfare claims against all the other services that their constituents value. The five giants that Beveridge set out to tackle in his 1942 report that set the foundations of the welfare state were want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. He never envisioned his successors promoting the last of those giants, idleness, by a warped understanding of the purpose of welfare.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
