by William Yarwood, media campaign manager
“Britain is a welfare state with an economy attached.” That’s how Kemi Badenoch opened her speech on welfare reform at the Centre for Social Justice. And it’s a line that should jolt anyone still in denial about the scale of the problem we’re facing.
She rightly praised the CSJ’s latest report, which lays out just how warped the incentives in our benefits system have become. According to their research, someone who’s economically inactive and claiming universal credit, housing benefit and personal independence payment can rake in around £25,000 a year. That’s more than the £22,500 take-home pay of someone working full-time on the minimum wage. In other words, you’re punished for working and rewarded for not. No wonder the system is creaking.
Kemi also cited TaxPayers’ Alliance research in Parliament and in The Telegraph, referencing our new benefits dashboard that exposes just how widespread the problem has become. Almost one in ten people in England and Wales now claim PIP, with some areas much higher. Mental health conditions like anxiety, depression and ADHD are increasingly behind these claims, and the cost to taxpayers is ballooning. At this rate, health and disability benefits alone will cost us £100 billion a year by the end of the decade. That should terrify anyone with even half an eye on the nation's finances.
To her credit, Kemi is at least willing to acknowledge the scale of the problem, unlike many of her parliamentary colleagues, particularly those on the Labour backbenches, who went into meltdown over plans to reduce the benefits bill by a modest £5 billion. But while the rhetoric is refreshing, there’s still a glaring lack of detail. Other than voicing opposition to lifting the two-child benefit cap, a policy proposed by Reform and Labour backbenchers alike, there’s been very little in the way of actual proposals.
And let’s be honest: plenty of the problems we’re seeing now were seeded by the Conservatives themselves. It was the Tories who enshrined “parity of esteem” between mental and physical health into law. A nice sounding proposal that, in practice, has fuelled a massive rise in claims for conditions like anxiety and depression. Claims that, in many cases, qualify people for the enhanced rate of PIP and, through that, the motability scheme. That means taxpayer-subsidised, insurance-free cars with road tax and VAT exemptions handed out to people whose eligibility often rests on a vague online questionnaire.
Speaking of online questionnaires, the COVID-19 lockdown turbocharged this entire mess as well. When lockdowns hit, in-person assessments for PIP were scrapped, replaced with remote ones. And surprise, surprise, the number of claimants surged. Today, just two per cent of assessments are done in person. At a time when more scrutiny was needed, the opposite happened: the gates were thrown wide open.
Sam Ashworth-Hayes nailed it in The Telegraph when he pointed out that Covid didn’t just change how we work, but it changed how we view the state. Suddenly, people who’d never claimed a benefit in their lives found themselves on furlough, getting grants, loans and handouts - the 2010s Cameron era stigma around ‘claiming’ disappeared. And once people got a taste, many didn’t stop. As Ashworth-Hayes put it, “exposure to the welfare system has the effect of increasing future use.”
Now, I’ll give Kemi some leeway. Welfare reform is tricky, especially when your party’s base skews older and therefore is apprehensive about changing anything involving the state pension or winter fuel payments. But there is precedent. Iain Duncan Smith, who founded the CSJ, pushed through major reforms during the coalition years. It can be done, but only if there’s backbone.
If Kemi’s serious about getting to grips with the benefits bill, she needs to start laying out the detail of what reform looks like. How to bring back proper in-person assessments. How to tighten up the criteria for mental health claims, so that benefits go to those who genuinely need them. How to crack down on foreign nationals who come here to abuse the system. And if it doesn't include the sacred cow of the triple lock, it will be partial reform at best.
Right now, Kemi is saying many of the right things. But opposing winter fuel payment reforms doesn’t exactly scream fiscal discipline. If she wants to paint Labour and Reform as two sides of the same welfarist coin, she needs to do more than talk tough. She needs a serious, costed plan.
Because if we don’t get a grip, Britain won’t just be a welfare state with an economy attached - it’ll just be a welfare state.