Welfare

Wednesday 11th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I inform the House that I have selected the amendment in the name of the Prime Minister. I call the shadow Secretary of State.

12:49

[Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House calls on the Government to commit to bringing working-age welfare spending down in this Parliament.

The day after the Budget, we heard the Chancellor on the radio telling the country some good news: the welfare bill would come down in this Parliament. But hold your horses, Treasury spinners hit the phones just minutes later to say that they could not commit to that. Even No. 10 intervened to say that it has never set an arbitrary target or timetable. By 5 pm, the Chancellor had done a remarkably rapid reverse ferret. He popped up on Channel 4 to tell us that the Government will not bring down welfare this Parliament after all. What a mess. It was, “Oh yes, we will,” then, “Oh no, we won’t.” It is a bit early for pantomime season. Seriously, what is going on over on the Government Benches?

The bill for working-age welfare is £183 billion a year, and it is set to rise to more than £200 billion. Taxes are up, borrowing is up, the cost of borrowing is up, and the Government cannot tell us how they will fund 3% of GDP on defence, on today of all days. They said that they would not put up taxes on working people, but paying for all that welfare will cost working households £50,000 in taxes over this Parliament. The country cannot afford this Labour Government, but it is what we have come to expect from them—no plan, no conviction and no backbone, just ducking tough choices and leaving working families to pay the price.

[Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)]

My hon. Friend mentions that the Government have no plan, and that includes not having a plan to fund defence. Does she agree that there is no social security without national security, and that threats to the UK are real, present, multiple and serious? Putting off increasing defence spending until later on in the autumn or perhaps even later is a dereliction of duty. The first duty of any Government is to protect our constituents and this nation, and putting off defence spending increases is putting our nation at risk.

[Helen Whately]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. The first duty of Government is national security. We will not even have social security if we do not have national security. We have to find a way to fund defence. There is no time to waste. As I will set out in my speech, there are plenty of opportunities to make substantial welfare savings, to cut taxes, to bring down the deficit and to fund defence.

To be fair, some Government Members understand the situation that the country is in. Some of them know that their constituents understand it, too. That is why they sometimes go through the motions, as with their amendment today, albeit they hid it at the very end, with some wording that they want to “bring down the benefits bill”. I wonder whether Labour Whips were hoping that their leftie Back Benchers would not read that far. Though Labour talks about bringing down the bill, there is no date. It is the same thing when the Prime Minister says that he wants to bring welfare spending down

“as soon as we possibly can.”

It is nonsense. Without a date or plan, it is just empty words. No one trusts this Government on welfare. Apparently there will not even be any savings in the Prime Minister’s 10-year plan.

[Josh Fenton-Glynn (Calder Valley) (Lab)]

The hon. Member says that we do not have a plan to bring down welfare spending. We are putting £3.5 billion into getting young people back into work. Can the hon. Member tell me how the Opposition arrived at their £36 billion figure—the Institute for Fiscal Studies does not know—and, indeed, how much they will put into getting young people back into work?

[Helen Whately]

I will set out how we will achieve our £36 billion in savings, if the hon. Gentleman will just sit back and listen. All we have heard from him and his party are plans to spend more money, and he simply reiterated that just now. We do not bring the benefits bill down by spending more money.

This is not just about the welfare bill. Let us talk about what is happening to our country. A total of 6.7 million people of working age are not working and are on out-of-work benefits, and 700,000 of them are under the age of 25. This is a disaster. All those young people are sitting at home whiling away the day instead of going out to work and getting on with their lives. One in four adults now identify as disabled. Claims for personal independence payment have doubled since 2019, but the country is not twice as sick. Hundreds of thousands of households claimed more than £32,000 in benefits last year, and some of them claimed more than £60,000. That is almost twice the average take-home pay of a British worker. People who are working are asking, “Why do I bother?” We cannot expect taxpayers to keep funding a welfare system that is clearly so broken and so unfair.

[Mark Pritchard]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her generosity in giving way. I am sure she would like to see the details at some point, but is she aware that some people are actually getting mortgages to buy houses on the basis of the benefits they receive, and that those on benefits who can save a little are actually using benefits to save for a deposit? I am in favour of cutting benefits as long as we protect the most vulnerable, but it is fundamentally unfair that people in my constituency who are working in factories, on farms and in offices and are struggling to save for their first property or pay their mortgage should be outdone by those who are being paid by the taxpayer to sit at home. They can have benefits, but they should not take advantage.

[Helen Whately]

That is an important point. Most people want to see a welfare system that supports those who really need help. They want to see a welfare system that is a safety net, not a lifestyle choice.

[Daniel Francis (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Lab)]

Following the scenario that we have just heard, my understanding is that the Conservatives believe that someone can pay their mortgage for 20 years, be retired on grounds of ill health or disability and then not pay the remainder of the mortgage, because it should not be possible for those who do not work to conclude their mortgages. Is that the position of the Conservative party?

[Helen Whately]

It sounds to me as if the hon. Member has wilfully misunderstood and misrepresented what my right hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard) said a moment ago.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. Can we please be a little bit careful about the use of words such as “misrepresented”?

[Helen Whately]

My apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am sure that that was not the intention of the hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis).

Reforming welfare is not cruel to people on benefits—quite the opposite. What is cruel is failing to reform welfare, parking young people on benefits while taxing and regulating jobs out of existence, and telling people that a handout is the answer to their problems rather than going out to work. Truly what is cruel is what the Government are doing to hard-working families: squeezing them with tax rises, higher inflation and higher bills so that there is less to go round at the end of the month, all to fund the lifestyle of “Benefits Street”.

[The Minister for Social Security and Disability (Sir Stephen Timms)]

I agree with the shadow Secretary of State that failing to reform welfare is a very serious failure indeed. Her party was in government for 14 years. Will she tell us in which years spending on welfare fell?

[Helen Whately]

The right hon. Gentleman’s intervention is extremely timely, as that is literally the next bit of my speech. I thank him for taking me on.

The Government like to say that all this happened on our watch. Let me remind them what actually happened. Last time Labour left power—no surprises—we inherited high unemployment, a rising welfare bill and more than a million young people not in education, employment or training. During the 2010s we brought down unemployment, brought down the number of NEETs and brought down the welfare bill. In the 2020s, as we all know, covid and lockdowns accelerated the rise in claims for mild mental health conditions and neurodiversity, and the number of NEETs did go up, although it did not reach the level it is at today under Labour. When this Government showed up, they had no plan, and in fact they have only made things worse.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

rose—

[Daniel Francis]

rose—

[Helen Whately]

I will not give way again. They will have their opportunity to speak in due course.

Let me remind the House of the things that the Labour Government have done—of which, no doubt, they are proud—to make benefits easier to claim and more generous. As soon as they entered office they cancelled our sicknote reforms, our PIP reforms, and our plans to update the work capability assessment to reflect the option to work from home. Then, one year in, they cobbled together some poorly thought through changes to save just £5 billion from the benefits bill. Even that was too much for Labour Back Benchers. In a moment of utter shambles—we have never seen anything like it—on the Floor of the House, in the middle of a debate, amid a flurry of concessions, they ripped up their own legislation. In true Labour fashion, the Bill ended up costing money instead of saving any.

One of those concessions was the Timms review of personal independence payment. I have a great deal of respect for the Disability Minister, but what hope is there for his review, given that it started out as a bargaining chip to buy off angry Back Benchers? No wonder it has ruled out making any savings. In fact, its recommendations so far will actually increase the benefits bill. It says that PIP is not generous enough and too hard to claim, although we know that one in six people on PIP admit that they face no extra cost for their condition, and “sickfluencers” sell scripts and model answers so that people can game the system.

Desperate to make his MPs like him again after his savings fiasco, Keir Starmer scrapped the two-child benefit cap despite promising that he would keep it. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] Labour Members are cheering again. I remember that they cheered at the time, but they got rid of him anyway. Let me remind them that nearly half a million households received an extra £5,000 in benefits, and about 75,000 received between £10,000 and £21,000 more. That is more than the income of someone working full time, just in extra money. People can see that this is a benefits bonanza.

[Natasha Irons (Croydon East) (Lab)]

More than half the households to have benefited from the lifting of the two-child limit have somebody who is in work. I wonder what the hon. Lady would say to those people, given that she is talking as if they do not work or contribute. The lifting of the limit will have helped their household, kept them in work and helped their children to not be in poverty.

[Helen Whately]

What would the hon. Lady say to people who are not on benefits, who ask, “Can we afford to have another child?”, and decide that they cannot? The fact is that someone who is in work and decides to have another child will not be given a pay rise.

None of what I am saying should come as a surprise, given that 204 Labour Members have more PIP claimants in their constituencies than the size of their majorities. No wonder the Welfare Secretary has said that all his MPs ask him is, who can they tax more in order to pay more benefits? Most Labour Members see no problem with the size of the welfare bill. The Disability Minister himself said that

“the current level of spending is not a great concern”,

but some of them know that the anger is building out there. People who work are getting tired of being taxed to the hilt to pay for people who do not. Some Labour MPs will desperately want to reassure their constituents. They will be hoping that the Timms and Milburn reviews will give them some succour, but they will not face the facts, and neither will they bring down the benefits bill. Labour spin doctors may try to say otherwise, but nobody is buying it.

The Conservatives are the only ones with a plan that backs welfare savings—no ifs, no buts. Our reforms will save £36 billion.

[Josh Fenton-Glynn]

How?

[Helen Whately]

The hon. Member asks “How?” from a sedentary position. I have our plan with me here and, if he will just listen, I will set it out.

As I said, our reforms will save £36 billion. When the Prime Minister was asked about them, he said that they were just a number. He could not be more wrong. Savings are important, but reforming the welfare system is a good thing to do in its own right. We have not just plucked a big round number out of thin air; it takes hard graft to work out who should get support and what help they should get. It also involves saying who will not get benefits any more, which is not something that welfare party Members will ever have the courage to do.

[Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Lady knows that I always try to find cross-party consensus where possible. [Interruption.] I know—sometimes it is difficult, right? She referred to the Timms review. I am very pleased that my right hon. Friend the Minister is leading that review, because he is absolutely the right man for the job. Does she recognise that one of the things that the Timms review is looking at is the importance of bringing back in-person assessments for PIP? Those were scrapped by the previous Government. I am sure that she will come up with reasons for why that happened, but does she not recognise that it is good to bring them back? In-person assessments mean that we can get PIP to the people who need it, and fraudulent claims will go down. I did not mention Harlow—sorry!

[Helen Whately]

The hon. Member—for Harlow—has indeed found an opportunity for consensus across the House. We do want to see face-to-face assessments brought back. In fact, we want to see the Government get on with it—the sooner, the better.

If the Government are asking people to fund our welfare system, that system needs to do what the public want it to do. Our plan is grounded in five clear and widely held principles: fairness; contribution; responsibility; welfare as a safety net, not a lifestyle choice; and living within our means. Unlike the Timms review, we will not shy away from reforming sickness and disability benefits. We should not be telling millions of people that they need handouts from the state for milder conditions, neurodiversity and anxiety. The state is telling people that what matters is what they cannot do or what they find difficult, not what they can do. We will stop giving PIP for mild mental health conditions and routine back and joint pain, and shift from cash handouts to support, backed by an extra £1 billion of funding. This will save £13.7 billion a year.

The same tragedy is unfolding in children’s benefits. The number of child disability living allowance claims for behavioural conditions, learning difficulties and ADHD has doubled since 2020, as Policy Exchange’s recent excellent paper has highlighted. Even the Government’s own adviser, Professor Fonagy, has said that the actual prevalence is not going up at the same rate, yet half a million more children will be signed on under this Government. That is half a million children being told that they have something wrong with them, that they cannot succeed and that they need handouts, which can be up to £20,000 a year. I have heard stories of children saying that they do not want these labels foisted on them, but they are not being given a choice. Child disability living allowance is a conveyor belt on to PIP and then a clear path to becoming another of the 1 million NEETs, so we will reform DLA. Yes, cash should go to the families of seriously disabled children, and we will provide £1 billion of extra support for those with milder conditions. After that, we will save £2.8 billion from these reforms.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

It is not often that I disagree with the hon. Lady, but I have to put this on the record. In my constituency, a large number of children are assessed by specialists, be it privately or through the NHS, and the number is rising greatly. They are assessed by professionals, who agree that they have ADHD, dyslexia or another challenging disability. The figures in my constituency tell me that things are getting worse, and the medical evidence proves it. Does the hon. Lady not agree?

[Helen Whately]

I did refer to the Government’s own review and the work of Professor Fonagy, because that review says that the prevalence is not rising at the same rate as the claims. Clearly, something must be done to make sure that assessments are being done properly. That is very serious and it requires further work.

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

The broader question is not so much whether the rates are going up, but whether having any of these diagnoses should preclude people from working.

[Helen Whately]

My hon. Friend makes a really important point, and—

[Marsha De Cordova (Battersea) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Helen Whately]

I am responding to an intervention, if the hon. Lady will give me a moment.

There is a really important point to be made. Following this debate, I will no doubt receive a lot of criticism about some of the things I say from people who are neurodiverse. However, many people who have an ADHD diagnosis who are in work will respond by talking about the strengths that they believe their ADHD gives them. In fact, if he does not mind my mentioning it, my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight East (Joe Robertson), who is sitting beside me, has recently received an ADHD diagnosis and has had the courage to talk about what that means for him. We should talk about what people can do, not what they cannot.

[Marsha De Cordova]

rose—

[Mark Pritchard]

rose—

[Helen Whately]

I will make a little progress.

Britain cannot be a cash machine for the world. Migrants come here believing that we will give them money, free healthcare and a house. This has to change. We will stop giving benefits and social housing to foreign nationals with indefinite or limited leave to remain, because being British has to count for something. That will save £9.5 billion and free up 230,000 social homes for British families who are stuck waiting. Labour Members should think about how much that will help British families facing homelessness.

We will save £1 billion by fixing loopholes in the household benefit cap and stopping households on benefits claiming endless cash, and a further £1 billion by rooting out fraud and error. Working families do not get a pay rise when they have another child, and families on welfare should not do so either, so we will bring back the two-child cap and save £3 billion. We will save an extra £4.5 billion by reforming housing benefit, which will include reforms that both Onward and the IFS have argued for. There will be no more asking taxpayers to pay for people on benefits to live in places where working people cannot afford to live, and we will save another half a billion pounds by tackling long-term unemployment. People who could be working but choose not to do so will have their benefits cut by a third after six months and be put on to a card, instead of receiving cash. Some people call this a nanny state measure, but it is not. It is not their money; it is taxpayers’ money.

Labour Members could show today that they understand the anger out there. They could show that they have found their moral compass—or are they going to keep on backing “Benefits Street”? We know where we stand. The Conservatives are on the side of people who get up, go to work and pay their taxes. They are the ones who fund our welfare system to support the seriously sick and disabled, and people who fall on hard times. Most people think our approach is the right thing to do. What they will not accept is being taken for a ride. We do not take their hard graft for granted, and it is time for Labour Members to decide where they stand.

13:19

[The Minister for Social Security and Disability (Sir Stephen Timms)]

I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “House” to the end of the Question and add:

“notes that the previous Government left over one million young people not in education, employment or training, while overseeing a £33 billion rise in the welfare bill in its final year alone; recognises that since the General Election one million more people are in work and 397,000 more people are economically active; welcomes the imminent publication of the Milburn and Timms reviews; and supports the Government’s commitment to deliver welfare reforms that break down barriers to employment, support more people into good, secure work and bring down the benefits bill.”

The welfare system that the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) has just been criticising is the one that her party designed and built, and then failed to reform when the Conservatives were in office. They failed abjectly on its financial cost and on its human cost. Over 14 years, they utterly failed to reform the system. She said at one stage that they had cut the welfare bill. I asked her in how many of those 14 years the bill fell, and she did not answer the question—not surprisingly—because the answer is none: it never fell in that 14-year period.

On the Conservatives’ watch, 2.8 million people were out of work due to long-term sickness. Progress on the disability employment gap stalled. It fell steadily under the last Labour Government, but it barely shifted during their 14 years in office. The number of young people not in education, employment or training went up by a quarter of a million just in their last few years in power. The number of children in poverty went up by hundreds of thousands, setting back their life chances and making them much more likely to be not in education, employment or training as young adults. Welfare spending rose by £33 billion in their final year in government alone.

[Dr Mullan]

The Minister is berating us on the question of spending during our time in government, arguing that we did not bring it down, but can he name a single one of those years in which the Labour Opposition asked us to bring it down?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

The hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent claimed that spending had been reduced; it never was. That never happened, and it would not happen under the proposals she talked about, as I will come to in a moment.

These latest ill thought through proposals show that the Conservatives have learned nothing from their time in government. They are making exactly the same mistakes all over again in opposition: crude cuts to put more people into poverty; more people pushed on to disability benefits; 1 million young people not in education, employment or training; and an explosion in the welfare bill. Those are crude cuts, with no thought for the human costs, which means that savings will never materialise. How much would their proposals increase child poverty? How much would they increase homelessness? How much would they add to their costs of failure?

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

I have a great deal of time for the Minister, and we have worked together on many welfare and other issues in the past, but does he not recognise that in the five-year period between 2010 and 2015, the number of workless households fell by 600,000? Can he please explain to the House, including his hon. Friends, why his party when in opposition—after the financial crisis and the former Labour Government had let unemployment go up—voted against every single welfare reform measure put forward by that Conservative Government?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

Let me tell the right hon. Lady about one of the welfare reform measures in that period. As she will well remember, disability living allowance was replaced by the personal independence payment in 2013. We were told by the Conservatives that that would save £2 billion a year. That saving never, ever materialised: it was never delivered. In 2017, they said they would save hundreds of millions a year by scrapping the higher benefit, on top of the universal credit standard allowance, payable to people in the intermediate category with limited capability to work. What happened was that large numbers moved instead on to the highest rate—up to the limited capability for work-related activity category. In that case, it was not simply that the saving did not materialise, which it certainly did not, but that they ended up spending a lot more. Even worse, once people had LCWRA status, the system no longer offered them help to find work. Those people were completely abandoned, which was a big part of the reason why this Government inherited 2.8 million people who were economically inactive on health grounds.

[Mark Pritchard]

The Minister has been in this place a very long time, and the whole House knows his experience on pensions and welfare reform. Can I just encourage him not to overextend his response today ahead of the Milburn report? There may be some contradictions between what he says today and what Lord Milburn says in his report about the importance of getting people into work and how that is compassionate. The most compassionate thing is getting people off benefits and into work, not topping up their benefits endlessly. He may find that the Milburn report takes a different view from some of the—forgive me—ideological points he has been making.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I have not been ideological at all; I am just telling the House what the previous Government did. Like the right hon. Gentleman, I am looking forward to the publication of the Milburn report, which, as the Prime Minister has just told us, will take place next week.

[Daniel Francis]

I have been a member of the Labour party for 32 years, and I believe that being a member of the Labour party means supporting people in work. However, I have heard Conservative Members and the shadow Secretary of State repeat the claim today that everything was the fault of covid. Yet the statistics, both the absolute numbers and in percentage terms, from my borough—the London borough of Bexley—rose more from spring 2022 to spring 2024 than they did from spring 2020 to spring 2022, so the fault was not covid. The fault was that the Conservatives lost control of the system. Why, therefore, do they have any credibility in arguing this case?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and the increase in the number of NEETs at the end of the Conservatives’ term in office was particularly staggering.

Just setting out a list that adds up to a big number does not solve the problem. The Conservatives should have realised that by now. Theirs was a catastrophic record—waste, lost potential, moral failure—and we are not going to leave that unchanged. Too often, their system was writing people off instead of giving people the help and support they need. We are absolutely determined to fix the system we inherited, in the interests both of those who depend on benefits and of taxpayers who pay for them.

We have already narrowed the gap between what people get on the health element and the standard allowance in universal credit. That feature of the system, which the Conservatives left behind, was forcing people to aspire to be classed as too sick to work. The social security system simply should not force people to do that. The system should be encouraging people to look for work and providing the support to make work feasible. That is what we are reforming the system to do.

We are restoring face-to-face assessments for health benefits, and I am glad the shadow Secretary of State supports that. The number collapsed under the Tories, as they were never reinstated after the pandemic. We have also started to change the equation under which the last Government spent £25 on benefits for every £1 spent on opportunity, because the best way to bring benefits spending down is to put opportunity at the heart of the system and get people into work.

[Jim Shannon]

I thank the Minister for setting out a very distinct way forward. None of us in this House on either side of this Chamber is against sensible savings in benefits, which are welcome, but that can never, ever be at the cost of the genuinely disabled or the terminally ill. I always try to be helpful to the Minister in these debates. Gordon Lyons, the Minister for Communities in the Northern Ireland Assembly, has taken a zero-tolerance approach to benefit fraud. By ramping up investigations, and tackling and catching benefit fraudsters, he has saved £60 million in the last year. Does the Minister agree that tackling fraud and getting those who can work into jobs has to be the way forward?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about the importance of tackling fraud—my hon. Friend the Minister for Employment took the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery Bill) through this House—and about ensuring there is always support for those who have no alternative but to depend on the social security system, and we will always do so.

Since the general election, 1 million more people are in work and the rate of increase in welfare spending as a share of GDP over the new Office for Budget Responsibility forecast is expected to be half what it was in the previous Parliament. That is very positive progress, but there is a great deal more to do, and turning that inactivity-opportunity equation around is key for young people, because the longer they are left on benefits or out of work at the start of what should be their working lives, the harder it is to come off those benefits, and the worse and longer lasting are the consequences. That is why we are making a £2.5 billion additional investment in the youth guarantee to get more young people earning or learning.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)]

The Minister is outlining the progress he wants to make in getting people back into work, and I know he has put a lot of hard work into that, but the reality, as we know from talking to businesses, is that they do not want to employ younger people now, because of the decisions taken by the previous Chancellor of the Exchequer: lowering the threshold for national insurance and increasing employer national insurance; increasing the minimum wage at a higher rate than for older people; and passing the Employment Rights Act 2025. Businesses perceive it to be too great a risk to be worth hiring somebody who does not have the experience others may have. I say openly to the Minister that those issues must be addressed if he is to open up the market and get young people back into work.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

We are taking initiatives to do exactly that. Contrary to what the right hon. Gentleman has said, I would say that employers want very much to give opportunities to young people, because they know that their future depends on that.

[Alison Griffiths (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton) (Con)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I will make a little more headway and then will gladly give way to the hon. Lady.

We are increasing, for example, the number of youth apprenticeships to reverse the 40% decline in starts in a decade that kicked away a vital first step in the career ladder for many. I can remember, as I think will others, Tory Ministers year after year announcing apprenticeship targets that never got anywhere near being achieved. On more work experience places, the right hon. Gentleman may have heard the recent announcement from the British Retail Consortium. Employers want to give young people a chance to break the “no experience, no job” cycle. There is a £3,000 hiring incentive to help employers who take a chance on young people, on top of the existing employer national insurance contributions relief.

I will give way to the hon. Lady and then I will need to make some headway.

[Alison Griffiths]

I thank the Minister for giving way. He will know that employers across all our constituencies, and particularly those in hospitality, who are typically among the most prolific employers of youngsters, are telling all of us on both sides of the House that the Government’s jobs tax, the Employment Rights Act 2025 and the increase in the national minimum wage for youngsters is pricing them out of the market. Will he reconsider?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I have told the hon. Lady about the announcement that the British Retail Consortium has made. Hospitality employers also want young people to have opportunities in their businesses, and I think we will be hearing more about that before too long.

We have youth hubs being set up in every community to offer wraparound health, housing and employment support. I visited mine in Newham last week, hosted by West Ham United Community Foundation at the Foundry in Beckton. It was full of activity and optimism for the young people who were there. For long-term unemployed young people, there is a guaranteed job fully subsidised by the Government for six months, which from next April we will fast-track for young disabled people after just three months.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. Can I just say to him very politely—he knows the House respects the work he has done on this issue and his understanding of the broad picture—that none of those interventions would be required were it not as a direct result of Treasury policy? Change Treasury policy and employers will employ people of all abilities and all ages across the country. He is destroying job creation and then expecting plaudits for providing additional taxpayer money to subsidise people to create jobs that his Government are destroying.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his politeness, but the NEETs figure rocketed in the last three years of the Tory Government and that was not caused by a national insurance change. We are increasing the employment rate, making progress and tackling the terrible problems left behind by the previous Government. I will give way one final time and then I really must make progress.

[Chris Vince]

I thank the Minister for giving way, and I will make sure I mention Harlow in this intervention. One of the things that I think the previous Government got wrong—I say this as a former teacher—is that they narrowed the curriculum. That meant young people who would have benefited from more vocational, practical courses were missing out on the opportunity to train. That is something Harlow College has done very well. I invite the Minister to see the courses it provides to get the long-term unemployed into training and employment. Will he confirm that he is working with the Department for Education to ensure that we have a broader curriculum to cater for everybody’s needs?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

Yes, I will. My hon. Friend will know that we have a joint Minister between the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions to help us to make progress in exactly the way he describes.

It was disappointing to hear the shadow Secretary of State and other Opposition Members dismiss the support that we are providing. She would hear quite different views if she spoke to the young people hired under our jobs guarantee. Getting their first experience of a real paid job is a life-changing boost for a young person. It means an enormous amount to them and it is the crucial first break that they need, which we are determined they should have. They were not getting that under the previous Government. The truth is that people do want to work. Conservatives sometimes talk about strivers versus shirkers, and people making a mockery of the system—there was something of that in the hon. Lady’s remarks earlier. Deriding the efforts of people who may well be up against tough odds but who want to make a go of things is not the right way forward. This Government will stand alongside those people.

[Alison Griffiths]

Will the Minister give way?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

No, I am going to make some progress.

Anyone can find themselves in need of support at different times in their life. It will not be divisive rhetoric or public shaming that helps them to get on to the right track to make their contribution; it will be giving them a chance. That is what we are determined to do.

We have made a very important start not just with the changes to universal credit, the Right to Try scheme and the youth guarantee, but with more investment in employment support for long-term unemployed disabled people through Pathways to Work. We have 1,000 Pathways to Work advisers reaching out to people who the Tories just gave up on. They wrote them off as too sick to work and did nothing at all to help them. We know that many of those people want to work and they know they can if they have the right support. That is what we are providing for them.

We are encouraged by the early results coming out of our Connect to Work programme, providing tailored support for disabled people and others faced with complex barriers to work. The commissioning of that programme has been devolved to local government across England and Wales, because we know that councils are best placed to know in their local area who can provide the support that is needed, bringing together employment support, education, colleges, skills providers and the NHS to deliver the help that people need. We are publishing the results for each area every quarter, so that everybody can see how things are going and extra help can be provided in places where it is needed.

Sir Charlie Mayfield’s “Keep Britain Working” review has been looking at what more employers can do to make workplaces more welcoming to jobseekers with health impairments, and more accommodating to people who experience a health problem in the course of their employment. There is a great deal of employer enthusiasm for this, because employers recognise the benefits they can get from retaining their employees, with their skills and experience, and ensuring that they are supported to thrive in work.

[Alison Griffiths]

I thank the Minister for being so generous with his time. I would like to share the feedback I received from a business group in my constituency just before the Budget. What they tell me is that they would love to be enthusiastic about hiring and bringing on more young people, but they are feeling absolutely shackled by the taxes and regulations that are being imposed on them, layer upon layer.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

The British Retail Consortium recently announced a programme of 100,000 work experience opportunities and jobs for young people. There is a lot of employer enthusiasm here. Sir Charlie Mayfield, who I was talking about, started working up his ideas with 60 vanguard employers, after publishing his report a year ago. The vanguard group is now up to 230. With regional leadership across the UK, Keep Britain Working is working with another 400 employers, mostly small and medium-sized enterprises, to test and develop better approaches to managing health and disability in the workplace. We are looking at the reform of Disability Confident and we are recruiting an extra 480 staff to turn around Access to Work applications more quickly.

[Alison Griffiths]

rose—

[Sir Stephen Timms]

No, I am not giving way again.

Like the right hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard), I am looking forward to Alan Milburn’s report. His interim report on young people and work was a powerful rallying cry for change and a powerful indictment of the system left behind by the previous Tory Government. The steering group working on PIP, which I co-chair, will also be coming forward with our recommendations later this month. The final reports of both reviews will be published in the next couple of months. The Government will then consider the recommendations and bring forward a White Paper in the new year.

The social security system should always provide security for those who cannot work, but for those who can work the system needs to be a bridge to provide a way into greater participation. That means going beyond the approach we inherited that provides an assessment, writes a cheque and after that says goodbye, with no offer of skills or training and no opportunity to get a job. We do not just owe young people an income; we owe them a future. Young people were starting to doubt whether they had a future. We need to show them that a way is being opened up, as it is. It means ending the Tories’ “signed off, written off” culture, changing the question the system asks from, “What benefit are you entitled to?” to “How do we help you to live the fullest life, to fulfil your aspirations?”

[Helen Whately]

rose—

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I will give way one final time.

[Helen Whately]

I object to the way the Minister is describing our approach to welfare, which I do not agree with. I have talked about how the Conservatives brought down the working-age welfare bill during our time in government. The Minister appears to disagree with that statement. Can he tell me whether he is disagreeing because he includes rises in the state pension during that time—so he is considering the full bill including the state pension—or is it because he is looking at figures in nominal terms?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

The hon. Lady has perhaps taken some advice and is conceding that the bill never fell under their 14 years in government.

We need to learn the lessons from the success of what has happened in other countries, such as Denmark, which the Secretary of State visited last week to see how a focus on asking what people can do, not just what they cannot do, has given it one of the highest disability employment rates in Europe.

The Tory party signed people off, wrote them off and then blamed them. Our approach is very different: we want to invest in people’s success and give them the chance of education, training, a decent job and a full life—not a life constrained by the limitations of benefit income. That is the way to bring hope for the future and bring the benefits bill down. In the next few weeks, the House will see the two major reports that we are bringing forward. The Government’s response to them will set out the details of how we will set about that task, and I am looking forward immensely to the debates ahead.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

13:41

[Steve Darling (Torbay) (LD)]

I am sure that all of us in this House agree that we need to manage the benefits system, but that we need to manage it appropriately. The Liberal Democrats fear that the official Opposition are playing the man rather than the ball. It is systems that are broken and need amending, and that is where the focus should be, rather than on demonising individuals.

As a Liberal Democrat, I am extremely proud that the architect of our welfare state was Beveridge, who issued his report in 1942, which was then taken on by the Labour Government of 1945 and has built the bedrock of our society since. It is something that we need to ensure evolves appropriately, rather than the slashing and burning that we have seen.

From my two years on the Work and Pensions Committee, I reflect on how extending the pension age has significantly impacted a lot of manual workers, who are unable to continue in those roles for year upon year until their retirement age, and thus have to fall back on the benefits system. That is a pressure that has not been there historically. Closer to home, I am aware of the individuals who 50 years ago would have died very early as premature babies, but who now often live through to adulthood because of the marvels of health services around the world. There is therefore an added pressure on our benefits system.

I also reflect—I am sure that other Members will agree— that I will not take lectures from His Majesty’s Opposition, given that they saw a £33 billion increase in the benefits bill during their last year in power. Another element that I am alive to about those years of Conservative Government is the lack of investment in our national health service. Capital money was used on revenue spending, which has left a gaping hole that will be a challenge for years to come—that money could have been used ensuring that we were getting people back into work.

On the Conservative proposals before us today, it is not so much about seeing that there is a mask, but that the mask has been completely removed. The Child Poverty Action Group suggests that the proposals would see the biggest plunge of children into child poverty that we have ever had as a nation. It is often suggested that it is all about people who work and people who do not, but one third of people who are on universal credit are in work.

A few weeks ago, I met in the Lobby a lady who had come up from Torbay hospital, where she worked. She puts a fair amount of time into the hospital, supporting some of the most vulnerable in our society, yet she is still in receipt of universal credit. That is a significant challenge that we need to be alive to: one third of people on universal credit are in work. Similarly, there is the suggestion that people on personal independence payments are out of work, but an awful lot of people use PIP to get themselves into work.

There is a significant pressure relating to local housing allowance. In London, only 2.3% of rents are affordable using that measure. In my constituency, the average rent for a studio flat is £577, yet the amount paid by local housing allowance is £503. There is a massive gap between rents and what the state supports people with; they will have to subsidise their rent with other benefits that they may receive.

The Liberal Democrats strongly believe that the best way to get people out of the benefits system is to grow our economy. The botched Brexit deal has seen a 32% reduction in job vacancies in the United Kingdom, and that pressure continues to build. Sadly, it has been exacerbated by the Labour Government’s NIC hike, which has seen 100,000 jobs lost in the hospitality industry—jobs that are often a first step on the employment ladder.

We need to be alive to how to fix the system. Only last week, the Work and Pensions Committee heard that the system that supports people on carer’s allowance is older than the data officer at the Department for Work and Pensions. Significant systems need renewing in the DWP if it is to be fit for purpose. Cliff edges in the benefits system for NEETs need to be tackled, so that people are encouraged to go into work. Access to Work needs to be ungummed up; it too has an old system that has problems getting people into employment. The Minister spoke about Disability Confident employers, but the scheme feels to me like a tick-box exercise. We need to ensure that disabled people and employers work together, so that the scheme becomes a lot more meaningful as a driver of people into employment.

I will say it again: we need to play the ball and not the man. The Conservatives are behaving like the Argentinian football team at the last world cup; they played the man, rather than the ball. We need a fair deal for those most in need.

13:48

[Michael Payne (Gedling) (Lab)]

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate, not least because it gives this House an opportunity to remind the Conservative party of a rather inconvenient truth. The welfare crisis facing our country did not begin on 4 July 2024; it was inherited on that day from a Conservative party that had 14 years to fix our welfare system, tackle economic inactivity, improve employment opportunities for disabled people and build a health service capable of getting people back into work. What did the Conservatives leave behind? They left millions of people economically inactive because of long-term sickness; a welfare system that too often wrote people off, rather than helping them back into employment; NHS waiting lists at record levels; and a generation of young people facing barriers to opportunity.

The welfare bill rose by £33 billion in the final year in which the Leader of the Opposition was in the Cabinet, and there was an increase of a quarter of a million young people not in education, employment or training in the final three years of the Conservative Government. That is not a record to boast about, but a record to apologise for, yet here we are, listening to Conservative Members—the very few who are present for this Opposition day debate—lecturing this Labour Government about the very problems that they created. They have apparently now discovered the answer to those problems: £36 billion of welfare cuts, and all during a cost of living crisis.

The ink is barely dry on the Conservatives’ proposals, and already the highly respected Institute for Fiscal Studies has raised serious questions about the credibility of their numbers—serious questions, by the way, that the shadow Secretary of State did nothing to address in her opening remarks. The Conservatives claim that they can save £14 billion by restricting health-related benefits for people with certain mental health conditions and with back and joint problems, but the Institute for Fiscal Studies points out that disability benefits are assessed according to the impact of a person’s condition, not simply the name of their diagnosis. The IFS also highlights that two thirds of personal independence payment recipients with a mental health diagnosis also have a physical health diagnosis.

I ask Conservative Members a very simple question: how exactly will they distinguish between somebody who is genuinely unable to work and somebody whose illness they have decided is not serious enough? Will it be a Conservative politician making that judgment, a Treasury spreadsheet, perhaps, or an arbitrary list of conditions drawn up to make their sums add up? Illness does not become less debilitating simply because a politician decides it is too expensive, nor does disability disappear because the Treasury wants to save money.

Then there is the Conservatives’ proposal to save £9.5 billion by restricting benefits for foreign nationals. Again, the IFS questions the certainty of these savings, pointing to the possibility that eligible individuals will seek to obtain British citizenship. There is a further problem with their figures, because the Department does not routinely publish a breakdown of benefit expenditure by nationality.

The Opposition need to explain precisely how they have calculated that £9.5 billion figure, what assumptions they have made about eligibility and future behaviour, and how much of that money they genuinely expect to save. Identifying a group of people and attaching a multibillion-pound saving to them is not the same as demonstrating that the saving can actually be delivered. A credible fiscal proposal needs to account for the people who acquire citizenship, those whose immigration status changes, and those who would remain eligible for support under existing rules. The IFS has already raised questions about the assumptions underpinning the Conservatives’ figures, so before Conservative Members start banking £9.5 billion in savings, perhaps they could explain how they intend to achieve them. A headline figure is not a costed policy, and a projected saving is not a saving until they can demonstrate where it will actually come from.

Perhaps the most extraordinary criticism of this approach comes from within the Conservative party. We have been here before: in 2016, the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith)—I notified him that I would mention him in this debate—resigned from David Cameron’s Cabinet over its approach to welfare cuts. He warned that the reductions in welfare for working people had “gone too far”, and criticised an approach to balancing the books that placed an unfair burden on the poor and vulnerable. These are the words not of a Labour politician, but of the man who designed the Conservative welfare programme and championed universal credit. I seriously think that Conservative Members should reflect on that. If even the architect of their own welfare reforms when they were last in government recognised that there was a point at which welfare cuts went too far, what exactly makes them think that another £36 billion of ill-thought-through cuts is the answer now?

I have to say that the use of the phrase “foreign nationals” intrigues me. Let me be clear: foreign nationals, in the main, are not entitled to benefits. They have no recourse to public funds. A look under the bonnet exposes the groups of people the Conservatives propose taking support from: 50,000 people who came here on humanitarian visas—half of whom, by the way, are in work. And who is entitled to a humanitarian visa? Ukrainian refugees, people who came here because they worked alongside our troops in Afghanistan, and British national overseas visa holders, particularly those from Hong Kong who are living in our constituencies.

There used to be consensus in this place that supporting the people I have just listed was virtuous, and that our commitment to our allies was unshakeable. Do the Opposition really think that the British public support cutting support for Ukrainian refugees, former soldiers and translators who worked with us in Afghanistan, and those fleeing oppression in Hong Kong? That is why they rely on such broad and politically convenient labels as “foreign nationals.” Examine the actual groups of people who would be affected, and the Conservatives’ proposals become much harder for them to defend. That is precisely why we should look beyond the headline figures and examine who would pay the price of these cuts. The next category the Conservatives talk about is refugees—people who came to this country fleeing war, persecution and famine; people who were vetted extensively and awarded refugee status by our country. The Opposition propose cutting off their access to benefits entirely. That is who they are referring to.

[Helen Whately]

What the hon. Member is saying about our policies is not correct.

[Michael Payne]

It would be really interesting to hear why it is not correct, because I have read the proposals referred to in the speech in detail. It is absolutely clear that that is who the Opposition are referring to when they use the phrase “foreign nationals”. If they want to bank made-up savings on the backs of refugees, they should come out and say so.

The next category is people with indefinite or limited leave to remain; the shadow Secretary of State mentioned them in her speech. As mentioned earlier, many of these people will simply seek British citizenship, meaning the Opposition’s claimed savings are illusory at best. It is also worth pointing out that 110,000 of these people are in work, so their benefits will likely be lower than the Opposition’s figures imply. That fact also completely blows a hole in their argument that contribution should be the basis of our welfare system. Those people contribute. They are our care workers, our nurses, and our NHS staff.

This is where the Conservatives’ argument becomes particularly difficult to understand. They tell us that welfare should reward contribution, and that people who work hard, pay taxes and contribute to our country should be recognised, yet they propose restrictions that could penalise people who are already doing precisely that. They cannot stand at the Dispatch Box championing contribution on Monday, and then propose taking away support from the people who contribute on Tuesday. Surely the test of a welfare system is not simply where somebody was born, but whether the rules are fair, whether a person is contributing where they can, and whether they receive the support to which they are entitled.

Finally, the remaining categories are “other” and “no immigration status recorded”. According to the Department’s spreadsheets, to which the Opposition have linked in their report, the “other” category includes “individuals no longer receiving UC payments”, so any savings attributed to that category are highly questionable. As for the “no immigration status recorded” category, there is as much chance that these are British nationals as not.

So what does that all mean for the £9.5 billion identified in savings? After accounting for the fact that the figure is likely to be inaccurate, accounting for those who seek British citizenship and accounting for the fact that the final two categories either contain no one claiming benefits or may not even contain foreign nationals, any remaining savings come from cuts to support for refugees, Ukrainians we have found homes for, Afghan interpreters we have an obligation to, and care workers, nurses and NHS staff we rely on.

Let us be clear about what we have established: the Conservatives have announced £9.5 billion in savings, but their own assumptions need rigorous scrutiny. Some of the people affected are refugees, some have supported our armed forces, and some are already working in our public services. Some may not even fall within the category that the Conservatives claim to be targeting. This is a very long way from the Conservative party of old, which used to be credible when delivering savings.

Let me turn to their proposal to move disabled people from the personal independence payment on to attendance allowance when they hit pension age. My word—a disabled person who worked their entire life, having assiduously saved, will finally reach the age at which they can retire, only to find that the Conservative party has ripped their personal independence payment away. I wonder how many Conservative Members have explained that proposal to the older disabled people in their constituencies. This is the problem with the Conservative welfare policy. The savings are announced in billions, but, as the Minister said earlier, the consequences are felt in individuals and families. The nasty party is truly back.

Let me be clear and unequivocal. I believe in welfare reform. I believe that those who can work should be supported and expected to work. I believe that taxpayers deserve a system that is fair, sustainable and protects public money, and I believe that fraud and abuse should be tackled robustly. Ministers should be commended for the work that they are already doing in that regard.

I also believe something equally important—that people who are genuinely sick, disabled or unable to work deserve dignity, security and compassion. Those principles are not contradictory; they are the foundations of a decent welfare state built by William Beveridge and people whose shoulders we in this House sit on. They are precisely why I support the approach of this Labour Government under the leadership of this Prime Minister. Rather than simply announcing make-believe cuts and hoping for the best, this Government are reforming the incentives within universal credit and investing £3.5 billion in employment support by the end of the decade.

We are providing personalised help to people who have too often been abandoned by the system. We are increasing the standard universal credit allowance above inflation while protecting existing recipients of the health element and those with the most severe lifelong conditions. We are supporting people into employment, not simply pushing them into poverty, and we are recognising that welfare reform cannot be separated from fixing the NHS, improving mental health services, investing in skills and creating decent jobs.

In Gedling, I meet constituents who want nothing more than the opportunity to work, contribute and build better lives for themselves and their families. They include people living with disabilities who face enormous barriers to employment, people with long-term health conditions who desperately want treatment so that they can return to the jobs that they love, and parents who work hard, pay their taxes and still struggle to make ends meet. They do not need another round of political finger-pointing or simplistic slogans like those we heard today from the shadow Secretary of State. They need a Government prepared to do the difficult work of reform. That is what this Labour Government are doing.

The Conservatives had 14 years to build a welfare system that works. Instead, they left behind a system that too often trapped people in inactivity, failed to provide the support that they needed and left taxpayers facing an increasingly unsustainable bill, as the Minister set out earlier. Now, from the comfort of opposition, out of office, they have produced a plan built around £36 billion of cuts, with serious unanswered questions about whether their figures add up.

Perhaps the most revealing part is that even their own former Work and Pensions Secretary warned nearly a decade ago that welfare cuts had gone too far. The lesson seems to be one that the Conservatives have chosen to forget. Welfare reform is not simply about how much money can be taken out of the system or somebody else’s pockets. It is about whether we can help people into work, protect those who cannot work and build a system that is sustainable for the long term.

They failed to fix the system when they had the power to do so. Now they want the country to believe that they have all the answers. Well, the British public have seen the Conservatives’ record, and this Labour Government will take absolutely no lectures from the architects of the very crisis that Ministers are now clearing up.

We will vote for welfare reform. We will protect those who need protecting. We will support those who can work into good, secure employment, and we will build a welfare state that is fair to taxpayers, compassionate to those in need and worthy of the country that we all aspire to be. That is the Labour difference, and it is one I am proud to defend.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. After the next speaker, there will be a five-minute limit. Dame Priti Patel.

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to contribute to the debate and to have heard speeches from both Front Benches. It is also good to be debating again with the Minister for Social Security and Disability, the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms), with whom I have had similar debates on welfare reform, from the opposite side of the House, a few times in the past.

I am intrigued by what I have heard so far, although Back-Bench contributions have been limited. I think everyone in the House will agree that we have a moral duty and responsibility to ensure the welfare system in this country is functional and does what it says on the tin. It should be a safety net for those who are in need of support, and we should all work together to find ways to get more people back into work. There is no dispute on that whatever.

The hon. Member for Gedling (Michael Payne) just quoted my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) when he was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. I was his Minister of State, and at that time we were undertaking regression analysis to ensure there were the right taper levels so that work paid and there were the right incentives for people on universal credit. There is a lot of technicality behind this, and with regard to those circumstances, I am afraid that the hon. Member’s quotation of my right hon. Friend was not totally accurate. I was proud to serve with my right hon. Friend in that Government and of the work we undertook.

[Josh Fenton-Glynn]

The right hon. Lady talks about incentivising people to get back into work. In the £36 billion of savings, can she point to where the investment in getting people back into work is?

[Priti Patel]

There is plenty of investment, starting with the work that needs to take place at the Treasury to stop putting burdens on businesses. We can have the same conversation in the other debate later this afternoon.

Back in 2010, we inherited a fiscal position in which £1 in every £4 spent was borrowed. When up against a weak fiscal position, the Government of the day have a duty to ensure they incentivise work, get more people off welfare and back into work—particularly at a time when unemployment had been rising. [Interruption.] If the hon. Member listens and goes back and looks at how the last Conservative Government did, he will know that is the case.

We saw around 1 million young people who were not in education, employment or training. Within five years, as I said in my intervention on the Minister, the number of workless households had fallen by 600,000. Over 370,000 fewer children were growing up in households where no one had a job. That is really important, because employment levels for single parents and those with disabilities and barriers to employment had also increased. Of course, it was the combination of the Work programme—all colleagues in the House should give some time to look at this—universal credit and welfare reforms that encouraged more people into work and gave them something we should all care about: the security and dignity that comes with having a job.

None of this is easy. This afternoon, we will hear lots of point scoring, but I stood at the Government Dispatch Box along with my hon. Friends to do the heavy lifting on welfare reform. In fact, it was prior to 2010, during the Government in which the Minister served—I think he was in the Treasury; he may correct me if I am wrong—that the Work programme first came into the public domain. We all heard about how the Work programme was all about working with employers and giving them incentives to do much more to get people into work. That also led to young people getting into work and more apprenticeships.

Apprenticeship starts are not straightforward; we have to incentivise them. People with disabilities had been written off—that was why we had Disability Confident, and I am pleased to hear that more work is being done to look at that scheme to get more people into work. All those people had been written off under previous Governments.

In the past, it was easier to sign people off than to create pathways to meaningful employment. We all have a duty to work with businesses in our constituencies to help people get into work. Madam Deputy Speaker, I am sure you saw in your constituency that employment rates increased for those signed off and on benefits. We also saw a halving of youth unemployment. Those are the things that had been achieved under previous Governments. Then, of course, we had the pandemic—we have heard about that—which absolutely changed the situation.

Under previous Conservative Governments, in every debate, every question time and every Budget—this is why I made the point I did to the Minister—our welfare reforms were not supported universally in the House, including by Labour Members. As the Minister does now, I fielded endless questions, urgent questions and Westminster Hall debates from Labour Members who simply could not accept that supporting people into employment and reducing welfare dependency was the right thing to do for those who had become trapped on welfare.

Nothing is worse than seeing families trapped on welfare, with the intergenerational welfare dependency that creates. All credit to colleagues, including former Secretaries of State, who worked hard to tackle that. We have a duty to find ways to reduce the costs for taxpayers and to do more to create pathways to work.

[Alex McIntyre (Gloucester) (Lab)]

The right hon. Lady says that there is nothing worse than seeing a family on benefits, but there was something worse between 2010 and 2015. In 2010, the Trussell Trust had 35 food banks in this country, but by 2015, it had 1,375 handing out 1.1 million food parcels a year. Does she agree that seeing a family not able to feed themselves and their kids, despite being in work and perhaps receiving some welfare, might be worse than having a welfare state supporting them?

[Priti Patel]

I remember what that time was like, and I remember the arguments about food banks—there were endless debates in the House about that. Is the hon. Member telling me that food bank usage has declined? It simply has not, and that is a stain on our society. [Hon. Members: “It has!”] I am afraid that is not correct. Why are we having this debate? It is because the welfare state is growing, and it is unsustainable. There are more people out of work now.

Labour Members cannot say hand on heart that their employment policies are helping the employment market. They should come to the Witham constituency, or go to any constituency, where they will see employers—family-run businesses—struggling to recruit and employ people because of Labour’s regressive taxation policies. Higher levels of employment tax mean more unemployment, which means more people going on to welfare. These are the basic policies—[Interruption.] There is no point in trying to point score; these are basic policies that the House has to get right.

There has to be recognition right now that the current policies are not helping people get into work. It is too easy to write off people on welfare, but all credit to Opposition Front-Bench Members who are saying things that people do not want to hear. Too many labels are being attributed to people out there in society that write them off. That is a stain on society. We should be helping them and working with employers to incentivise them back into work, not just have them trapped in welfare and benefit dependency.

[Dr Mullan]

On employers, there are various, complex ways in which the Government are trying to unpick the damage they did with their tax rises. Big businesses will engage with such projects—they can look at them for use across their entire workforce—but smaller businesses cannot as they do not have the mental thinking space or the time to go through them. We have seen the biggest drop in employment among those smaller businesses—the people who speak to me and tell me how bad things are—but the Government seem to be completely ignoring that.

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend is right. The Minister mentioned the British Retail Consortium in relation to young people. Yes, the BRC is a nationwide organisation, but across parts of the country—the east of England, and I am sure Sussex as well—family-run businesses do not have the ability to work at that level. It is the same in the hospitality trade. We are seeing this again and again.

We see it with first jobs. For many of us, our first ever jobs were behind tills, washing up or in the service sector. As everybody knows, in my family I grew up under the till, because my family ran small shops, but while employability skills are so valuable, those experiences have gone and it is harder to get a job. That is what we are lacking right now.

I commend my hon. Friends on the Opposition Front Bench for doing the hard yards in looking at how we can be better and proposing solutions and alternatives. They might not fit everybody—it is right that we debate and discuss them—but the House must recognise that the current situation is totally unsustainable. We need to do better by those trapped in welfare and give young people in particular opportunities and hope and create pathways for good future employment.

14:16

[Alex McIntyre (Gloucester) (Lab)]

Yesterday, the Conservative party told young people in my constituency that they are not showing up. I want to talk about the young people in Gloucester, who are ready to show up, and about what it will take to ensure that, when they do, somebody opens the door for them.

Let us start with the Conservatives’ record. The welfare bill did not appear from nowhere; it grew on their watch in a system they designed. In the last five years of the previous Government, the number of young people not in employment, education or training rose by more than 250,000, and welfare went up by £33 billion in that Government’s last year alone. Their plan to chase after Reform, to talk down to people on benefits, to pit neighbour against neighbour and simply to shout at people that they need to go back to work is not new, either. It is the exact same playbook we saw under 14 years of Conservative Government. What happened? More young people were left behind, there were queues round the corner for food banks, and almost one in three children—many of whom had parents in work—were growing up in poverty. We also had a special educational needs and disabilities system that failed to deliver for young people in my constituency, setting so many of them off on the wrong path and writing off their life chances at the earliest stage.

Now, the Conservatives want £36 billion more in cuts, and the shadow Work and Pensions secretary has confirmed that there will be no extra money for employment support. Same plan, no new support and expecting different results is not actually a plan—it is the definition of insanity.

Of course, we all want a lower welfare bill, but the question is how we get there. Alan Milburn’s interim report is clear about the scale of the challenge: nearly 1 million young people aged 16 to 24—one in eight young people—are not in education, employment or training. The review estimates the annual cost of that to our country at £125 billion, which is more than we spend on education each year, yet only about one in five NEET young people in England is getting meaningful employment support, and less than half of the £8.1 billion spent on key benefits for young people has any participation support attached to it. That is the real scandal of the system the Government inherited: it spent billions of pounds on benefits for young people but far too little on helping them into work.

In Gloucester, more than 2,500 young people are not in employment, education or training. When I speak to them, I hear the same thing time and again: they have applied for job after job, only to be ghosted. They are not lazy. They want to work. I am pleased that this Government are acting. The £3,000 youth jobs grant supports any employer that takes on a young person who has been claiming universal credit for six months, in a genuine job of at least 25 hours per week. The Budget delivered a jobs guarantee for eligible 18 to 24-year-olds on universal credit and £100 million for local apprenticeship services. Because the Government are getting people into work rather than writing them off, like the Conservative party, we will bring the welfare bill down for good—not by slamming doors in people’s faces but by opening them.

National action must be matched by local leadership. That is why on the 30 November, I will host the Gloucestershire Futures summit at Kingsholm stadium with Gloucestershire county council. We will bring together schools and colleges, employers, health services, local government and the voluntary sector in one room, with one shared goal that no young person in Gloucestershire is left behind. I am delighted that the Skills Minister will join us. The summit builds on our Gloucester Futures programme from this summer, from which 20 young people graduated after a week with local employers and partners from Fasthosts and the University of Gloucestershire to The Music Works and the Gloucester Rugby Foundation.

In Gloucestershire, we have to make sure that support sits in the communities that need it most, that growth and opportunity are our ambition for Gloucester and not just for Cheltenham, and that national initiatives are run by trusted community partners with a stake in our city. I have two asks of the Minister. First, will he meet me after our summit on 30 November, so that the solutions that Gloucestershire’s employers and partners come up with can feed into the Government’s response to the Milburn review? Secondly, will the Minister ensure that support reaches young people where they are and not where local government sit?

The Conservatives want to talk down Gloucester’s young people but, in fact, they are already showing up. Our job and this Government’s job is to make sure that when they do, the door is open, the support is there and we get them back into work.

14:19

[Bradley Thomas (Bromsgrove) (Con)]

Welfare can be, and is, a lifeline for so many. Yet among those who want to work—I am pleased that the Minister mentioned that there are lots of young people who do want to work—many cannot get on to the employment ladder, and there is a real danger that welfare then becomes a trap that can burden them for the rest of their life.

When I have travelled across my constituency over the last two years, since I was elected, I have heard a pretty universal message from young people and employers. I will start with the young people. I routinely have constituents email me expressing their despair at the fact that they cannot get a job. Often they are not even offered an interview after applying for hundreds of jobs. I have met a few of those young people, and it is really tough to listen to them because I see the despair and the despondency. They wonder what they can do to cut through. Is it them? Is it the fact that they have gone and got a degree that they feel might be worthless?

Conversely, when I speak with employers in my constituency, the theme is pretty universal, particularly among businesses in the hospitality sector—I mention hospitality because it is often the first rung on the employment ladder for so many young people. I have heard the same thing from so many of them: that ever since the Government increased the cost of employment, particularly the increase in national insurance contributions for young people, they have ceased recruiting. That is damning, because it does not mean that young people cannot get their foot on the ladder; it means that the first rung on the ladder has been cut out completely. The focus from Government has to be on how that step on the ladder can be re-established. That only comes from creating a thriving, fertile environment in which employers—those who create the jobs—are incentivised to provide those opportunities for young people.

There are young people out there who take risks, but they are few and far between because the cost of establishing a business is profound. I will mention two of those young people in my constituency, Sophie and Matt, who run a business called Toploaf, which I went to on Sunday after attending remembrance services. They are in their mid-20s and have established a thriving hospitality business in Bromsgrove. However, I know that they are worried about the increasing cost of doing business and terrified about the increasing cost of energy bills, and I was told that what the Government claimed was support in the Budget will not even provide any relief for them. Indeed, UK Hospitality cited a statistic when the Budget was released that only one in 10 businesses will benefit from the relief that the Government said they are providing.

If the Government want to provide people with the very best opportunities that do not restrict them to a lifetime on welfare, they have to support the wealth creators. Those wealth creators are not just the big corporates—every large business starts as a small business. All our constituencies contain hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of small businesses where people get up each day and do the right thing to create prosperity for themselves, the community and the young people they want to recruit.

The statistics are clear. We have 10.8 million working-age people not in work and 60,000 additional NEETs since 2024. According to the official statistics, between 2024, when the Government was elected, and 2032, the welfare bill is projected to grow by a staggering £57.7 billion. What does that do? If the welfare bill is growing but opportunities for economic prosperity are not, things go only in one direction, as the burden bears down even more heavily and increasingly on those who try to create the jobs for young people. In turn, that compounds the problem and further curtails the opportunities, and we see welfare dependency grow further and further.

The Government need to reverse the increase in employers national insurance and stop leaning into councils and local government as the sole arbiters of local economic prosperity. It is not that councils do not have a role to play, but the Government must, in the first instance, get off the backs of the businesses that create the jobs that allow our young people to get on in life.

14:19

[Matthew Patrick (Wirral West) (Lab)]

I am a progressive. I believe in a social safety net to help people in their moment of need. That might be to manage a health condition or to deal with a moment of crisis, or it could be to support people through the natural ebbs and flows of employment, which I think we will see more of with the advent of AI. There is a challenge, however, in getting that support to work for people. It requires a safety net, which needs to be the right size. It needs to be wide enough to catch people when they fall, but not so wide that people cannot escape it. The modern safety net should not simply break someone’s fall; it should support them to get back into work.

The benefits of work are many, and those benefits can bring so much to an individual: self-esteem, money, mental health, physical health, resilience, routine, friendship, socialising and demonstrating to yourself and others that you can make a difference. I believe that the benefits are endless, which is why it is so heartbreaking when we see just how many young people do not have them.

One million young people are not benefiting from a job or not expanding their opportunities through education or training. Why? The Conservatives created the broken system that led to the outcomes we see today. They do not like to hear it, but it is true. Their system pushed people further away from the job market. They scrapped the Work and Health Programme, shut down Work Choice and left Access to Work in chaos. They made support so difficult that people were pushed towards the health component of universal credit to simply deal with the cost of living crisis.

What was the consequence of that? There was no requirement for those people to look for work, apply for jobs or do any work-related activity. The Conservatives’ system both cost more and pushed people further away from work. Their system told people that they cannot. We need a system that helps people see that they can. Members will forgive me if I do not look to the Tory party for a route to achieving that.

[Simon Hoare]

Does the hon. Member not kick himself that, in the 14 years that Labour sat quietly on the Opposition Benches, with think-tanks and everything else, it did zero planning for welfare reform? We are two-and-a-bit years into this Government. We await the Timms review; we await the Milburn review. Labour should have had a plan ready to go from day one, should it not? That is a missed opportunity, is it not?

[Matthew Patrick]

I regret the results of the Conservatives’ failure; I sincerely do. I will come on to talk about how some of the benefits of the system we are introducing now will bear fruit.

The Conservatives say they have a plan, and as Members can imagine, it is pretty thin on detail. There is something that they are clear on, however, and there is something that they have a plan for: they can save money in the here and now. I do not think it is a long-term plan, but it saves some money now and that requires us to accept putting half a million children into poverty. That is not what I got into politics for. Let us say that a Member sits on the Conservative Benches and they can stomach that. Let me ask them: what is the long-term cost to society of plunging half a million children into poverty? That, for me, is not the route to reducing welfare.

There is a better way—a sustainable way—and we have already started. It starts with sorting out the very foundations that people rely on: mental health support in our schools, waiting lists falling in our NHS and quality homes that give people security. We are building on that by creating a new jobs and careers service that brings employment skills and career support together. There is a jobs guarantee that will help support over 90,000 young people into work over the next three years. We are personalising job support for disabled people to tackle the unacceptable disability employment gap of 28%. We are taking action with £3.5 billion of support for people who are too sick or disabled to work, but who want to work. We are rewarding employers who take a chance on a young person. If they hire a young person who has been out of the jobs market for too long, they will be backed with £3,000.

I do not pretend that this will solve everything overnight, but I think it makes a big difference. It helps now, and it is a down payment on the future of our young people. When the Milburn review comes out, we will have a plan to go further still. That is how we will do this for the long term. It is about finding solutions, not scoring points. A country that is hopeful and optimistic cannot go back to the failure that leaves young people on the scrapheap. The country has seen the Tory way, and it hears what the Tories are saying now. I do not think the country likes their politics of, “Do as I say, not as I do.” It wants a new approach grounded in problem solving. That is the Labour way that we are charting, whereby we will bring down the bill by helping people get back into work. It is the long-term solution: believing in the potential of our young people, and knowing that a good job gives them so much more than simply money at the end of the month. Our constituents deserve that, our country deserves that, and I am proud to support that.

14:31

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

The hon. Member for Gedling (Michael Payne) made a passing reference to William Beveridge in his speech. He is not often mentioned in the Chamber these days, but it was Beveridge’s decision to nationalise and bring into the political domain what was already the most evolved and most comprehensive welfare system of any country in the world, inherited from the Conservative Government that came before, that arguably put our welfare state on to the path of unsustainability that we see today.

A statistic that should chill us all is that today, 46.7% of our people live in households that are net contributors to the United Kingdom, while 53.3%—more than half—of our population live in households that receive more from the state than they contribute. That is not just about welfare—it is also about education, healthcare and other things—but it shows is a trajectory by which a greater and greater share of national resources is consumed by things broadly badged as welfare. Those people who come here, work hard, start businesses and contribute, about whom many have spoken warmly, and those born in the United Kingdom and whose families have lived here for generations see that they are able to gain less and less through their own efforts, because more and more of the available resources are consumed by those who are not currently contributing.

[Chris Curtis (Milton Keynes North) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman makes the point that roughly half of the people in this country give more to the state and roughly half give less than they take. If, on average, a large majority of people are giving more to the state than they are taking out, where would that money be going?

[David Simmonds]

Clearly, the benefit for people of keeping more of the money that they make is that they spend that money on the quality of life of their families from the wealth that they have personally created by their own efforts. What we are seeing is that a greater and greater share of the wealth that they are creating and more and more of the money they are earning through their jobs, or of the profits being generated by the businesses they run, is going into a central pot for the benefit of other people and, in many cases, delivering less and less benefit to those other people.

In the recent Budget, the announcement of £100 to help with heating bills was more than offset by the cost impact of the Government’s policies on household energy bills. The Government say that housing is really important, despite the fact that their own policies in the Renters’ Rights Act 2025 have massively driven up the cost of renting a home. They have made it harder for landlords to place a home on the market, and made it harder for developers to build, resulting in accelerating insolvencies in a sector that is crucial to our national economy. In many areas, the cost of state interventions has become grossly disproportionate to the benefit that accrues to the individual, and we as a party need to accept that we have had some responsibility in some of those areas.

This is a debate about working-age welfare. We have always accepted that we protect pensioners, because once people have retired it becomes much more difficult for them to increase their income by finding another job, but we need to find a better way of ensuring that work pays and enterprise pays if we are to address the long-term conundrum of growth in this country. So many of concerns that we all share—rough sleeping is often cited by Labour Members—have surged since this Government took office. More and more people are living on the streets of this country every day because of this Government’s policies. It is welcome that they talk about introducing policies to address that, but they are trying to fix with a sticking plaster a wound that they have created by their own actions.

The same is true of housing policy. It is also true of VAT on school fees, which has left our state schools net worse off than they were before. It is particularly true of national insurance, which has driven up the cost of employing people in this country, and the so-called Employment Rights Act 2025, which has, as we have all heard, made businesses more and more wary of hiring people and giving them the opportunity to get on the ladder to a job and prosperity.

Let us not forget that this is not just about money. This is not an arid debate that is solely about balancing the books. Having a job is good for mental health, for physical health and for family wellbeing. It is the one solution that we know makes the biggest difference to people’s opportunities in life. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel) described, one of the things that we should be proud to have done in office was to massively increase the share of working-age households earning their own living by their own efforts, rather than increasing the number who are dependent on welfare and benefits from the state.

This is a time of missed opportunity. The proposal that our Front Benchers have set out is about a subset of that issue. It is about how we deal with welfare, but it is also about how we get this country back on to a path where prosperity is something that all our people have a realistic prospect of enjoying. It is worth remembering that when the previous Chancellor set out this Government’s first Budget, it provided flat cash for every single Government Department except the NHS, and that was entirely dependent on welfare reform, which Labour Back Benchers immediately overturned. I say gently to Labour Members: please make sure that welfare reform is something you are willing to drive through, so that we can make the difference we need for this country.

14:37

[Deirdre Costigan (Ealing Southall) (Lab)]

The Conservatives are sat here today criticising welfare spending when we all know it was their Government that created the very system they are now complaining about. Universal credit was dreamed up by the Conservatives, and it created a system where people were better off on welfare than in a job. For under-25s, the choice was a poverty-level standard rate of £317 a month or a far higher disability rate of £747 a month—more than double. This of course created a massive incentive for young people to go on the higher rate, and because they got zero support, they were effectively consigned to never getting a job.

Since being elected, Labour has already changed this. We have cut the disability rate from £747 to £556 for those young people who may be able to work with the right support. We have made the higher rate only for those with a severe health condition or disability that is unlikely to change. This is the Labour way to reform welfare: looking after those who will never work and helping them, while encouraging those who can work to get into a good job by removing the perverse incentives that were created by the Conservatives.

The Conservatives also came up with the personal independence payment, although from the way they talk about it in this place, anyone would think it had nothing to do with them. It is a benefit that helps with the additional cost of being disabled, so it is supposed to be paid to those in work as well as to those who are not. In fact, over 80% of recipients are not working. A Unison report found that assessors routinely used the fact that a claimant was employed as justification to reduce or entirely withdraw their PIP award. As a result, disabled people left jobs or went part time to keep their PIP. This was yet another perverse incentive created by the Conservative benefits system, which made people better off not working.

Those perverse incentives are why, in the Tories’ final year in government, the welfare bill rose by £33 billion and almost 3 million people were not working because of long-term sickness. For over a decade, the Conservatives presided over a system that meant people were better off on benefits, and it is only now that they have been kicked out that they have decided it needs to change, but their answer is to slash benefits crudely in a way that would only see massive increases in child poverty and homelessness. It is a false economy, as the money will only have to be spent again on other public services.

[Dr Mullan]

Is the hon. Member’s position that, prior to 2010, under the Labour Government, someone was never better off on welfare than working?

[Deirdre Costigan]

Under the last Labour Government, work was the cornerstone of everything that we did, and we will continue with that under this Labour Government.

As I said, the Opposition’s approach to welfare is a false economy, and we will end up spending the money again on public services. It would just move the cost from the welfare bill to the NHS and local authorities. Their plan to bring back the two-child limit would see 3,660 children in Ealing Southall fall into poverty. That is not just a statistic; it is 3,660 children in Ealing Southall going hungry and cold, and it is the taxpayer who would still end up picking up the tab. The Conservatives’ claim to be able to cut £13 billion from disabled people’s benefits seems like a random number they plucked from the sky with no real plan.

The Leader of the Opposition says she can cut this £13 billion because

“Double amputees run marathons… People with autism”

have set up “tech companies”. She may be right about a very small number of people, but she should tell that to the parents in my constituency with non-verbal and developmentally disabled autistic children—parents who spend every single day of their lives fearing what will happen to their grown-up child when they die. I can only imagine how utterly crass and insensitive the Leader of the Opposition’s comments must sound to those parents.

Instead of scaring those parents, Labour is taking a measured approach to changing the system. We have commissioned the Timms report to look at making PIP fit for the modern world, where we know so much more about the impact of mental health and fluctuating conditions than we did a decade ago, and we have commissioned the Milburn review, which will radically change how we support young people to get into work.

Already Labour is spending £3.5 billion on employment support for sick and disabled people with personalised support through Connect to Work. We have invested in new apprenticeships and introduced a jobs guarantee, with paid work for six months, backed by mentoring and tailored support. Those reforms are part of our work to address the broken welfare system inherited from the previous Government and to ensure that the system supports those who can work while protecting those who cannot.

The Conservatives’ approach to welfare spending is to let it run out of control when they are in government and then come up with crude and financially illiterate cuts when they are out of government and will not have to deliver them. Instead of making families and their children sick, homeless and dependent on food banks, Labour’s choice is to bring down welfare spending in a safe and sustainable way by doing one simple thing: making people better off in work. That is the Labour way and that is the way that we will deliver.

14:43

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)]

I am going to take a slightly different tack in this debate because as the shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately), said, one of the reasons why welfare reform is needed is to cut the bill because we have to invest more in defence. That is being pushed down the road—the Government say that we may get to 3% of GDP by the end of the decade and 3.5% by 2035, but we know that what was asked for in the strategic defence review would not even get close to funding that.

I am going to say something that makes it feel like it is the 1930s: war is coming. How are we going to fund that? It is vital that we reduce welfare spending, because as my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent said, we cannot have welfare security without security. That lies at the heart of this question. As the Leader of the Opposition said, it is not just that we have to fund defence; we have to be able to fund defence, and we are not able to do that now.

[Mike Martin (Tunbridge Wells) (LD)]

Here is some crude maths: if we want to get to 3.5% on defence, it will cost about £30 billion extra a year, so where will that money come from? Furthermore, why are the Conservatives not supporting the Government on restricting the triple lock, because that would help with funding the future defence budget?

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

The first thing I will say to the comment about the triple lock is that the Prime Minister has done what the Prime Minister usually does: he said he is going to reform the triple lock but then said nothing else. It is very difficult to comment, given that we do not have a clue what he might be talking about. My second point is that it is not about how much the defence review would cost; it is about the fact that it has to be done. We have threats coming towards us—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. The right hon. Gentleman, as an experienced Member of the House, will know that the debate is about welfare, not defence. I can see where he is going, but he needs to tie it more closely to the motion.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

Well, the reality is that the motion is about welfare reform, which is about saving money. Members on the Opposition Front Bench have outlined the savings that we could make, and there has been much comment from the Government Benches, not least the accusation that people with mental health conditions are being stigmatised. There have also been accusations concerning people’s inability to work if they have an ADHD diagnosis. I would counter those accusations by arguing that when someone is told that, because they have a certain condition, they should not have to go into the workplace, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Many statistics have been thrown about in this debate on the increase in welfare from 2022, but in reality that period covers a time when a group of people left the school system and went straight on to welfare. It is all very well dismissing what happened during the pandemic, but it is crass, quite frankly, to say, “Well, it had no impact later on; that was all down to you.” The Leader of the Opposition has made it clear that, yes, welfare was not properly reformed, and the adjustments that needed to be made to universal credit did not happen during our time in power. That is a fact. It changed because people felt they needed more support and said, “Well, if you were going to give it on those grounds, you can give it to me on these grounds.” Of course, the other side of it is that an adjustment has not been made for the fact that there are now plenty of social media instructions on how to cheat the system. We have to address those issues, and we have to be able to understand what is being said.

To the Liberal Democrat spokesman, the hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling), who said that welfare was running out of control, I say that it was his leader who said back in March 2022, at the start of the war in Ukraine, when people’s mortgage rates started to rise, that the Government should be paying for those increases. That is a ridiculous policy, and it speaks to this whole idea that the Government should step in for every aspect of life that people find a bit hard. Life is hard. When we talk about people having anxiety, it is called being an adult, in a lot of ways. We all have anxiety. Most people in this building could lose their job tomorrow and would find that hard. That is anxiety. [Interruption.] There is a bit of chuntering from Members on the Government Benches; I know they are probably all nervous because they do not know whether the Prime Minister is going to go to the country. There has been plenty of speculation about that—bring it on, I say.

The reality of the situation is that if we carry on telling people that they do not have to go into the workplace because they have been diagnosed with something, and if we put more and more labels on them, it will become impossible to get them back into work, because they keep being told that they have a reason not to want to work, and to a certain extent they have been led down that path over quite a long period of time.

Welfare reform is necessary, but the things being said in this debate are all about future ideas. Nothing solid is coming across. There is a lot of theory coming across, but without savings we will not be able to invest in the defence and security we need to ensure that people have a secure nation and welfare security.

11:30

[Daniel Francis (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Lab)]

I start by declaring my interests. I chair the all-party parliamentary groups for wheelchair users and for access to disability equipment. I am also the parent of 13-year-old twins, one of whom I hope will work every day of her working life, and one of whom is on disability living allowance and, I know, will never work a single day of her life. I will refer to that lived experience later in my speech.

That is the lived reality for many people in this debate, and we need to listen to that. We need to listen to people like the hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling) and his lived experience. Some 75% of blind and partially sighted people in this country are not in work—a legacy of the last Government and something that this Government must get right. Again, while the Conservatives lecture us, that is the inheritance they left us. He is not currently in his place, but I thank the Minister for Social Security and Disability, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms), who visited my constituency last year to meet my disability charities, to hear their lived experience and to hear their good ideas for how things could work better.

This is not just a DWP issue. We will not get this right unless we look at what is going on in other Departments, such as the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Education. This morning I was with the Public Service Ombudsman as it launched its report into complaints about wheelchair contracts in the NHS. The report was clear that if we do not get those contracts right, wheelchair users will not return to work. On education, my goodness, we have inherited a hell of a mess in the SEND system, and a system that looked at excellence but not necessarily inclusion. Why are we therefore surprised that we have this crisis of people not being in education, employment or training? It is because we did not think about or plan for the long-term opportunities for those people.

We have left lots of young people on education, health and care plans post-16 in courses that are totally unsuitable for them, just as a way of extending the EHCP, and then we wonder why they do not have the skills needed for work. Sometimes they drop out of the system and become NEETs. The SEND reforms that this Government will bring forward will start to plan those matters so we work with those young people at that transition to understand their long-term prospects.

When I worked in retail it was not just a student job; I spent 11 years with Marks and Spencer—some of that time as a recruitment and HR manager, but most of it on the shop floor. A lot of my time was spent on these kinds of programmes with disabled people. A lot of that has gone by the way over the years, but this Government are bringing some of those schemes back. I go into the Bexleyheath store in my constituency and there are two people with learning disabilities who I worked with over 30 years ago who are still there in those jobs—jobs they are proud to have for their whole working lives. It is those schemes, which this Government are reinstating, that will bring that back.

As I said earlier, the real crisis with costs was not covid; it was 2022 to 2024, and the stats show that. My wife and I both had to give up full-time work in 2016, the year my child had 100 medical appointments, because it was unsustainable. I know from my lived experience of the impact on a family when they are drawn into that cycle of disability and carers and the problems that brings. It was a Conservative council that sent a social worker to my house and told us we would be better going on universal credit than trying to carry on part-time jobs and support our family in the best way we could. That kind of information, at the back end of the last Conservative Government, was given to families like mine, who were put on the scrapheap. This Labour Government will turn that around in the announcements we will make in the coming weeks, in the Milburn and Timms reviews, to finally reinstate that working support for disabled people in this country.

I will take no lectures on savings from the Conservatives. One of the first things I did with the previous Secretary of State, when I became an MP in 2024, was bring her the four-page letter my daughter had received every Christmas for eight years, telling her that she was going to get a £10 Christmas bonus—the money they were wasting sending people four-page letters every year, for eight years in my case, to tell them they were going to get a £10 bonus. They had no idea what was going on in their Department. The previous Secretary of State in our Government scrapped that letter at my request. The Conservatives have no room at all to start talking to us about waste in the Department.

Yes, there are reforms we need to make. Yes, there is more we will need to do to get disabled people back to work. I will support the savings, and there will be difficult conversations about the disabilities that people have, but I will never take lectures from the people who left us this mess.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. I will reduce the time limit to four minutes after the next speaker.

11:30

[Dr Neil Shastri-Hurst (Solihull West and Shirley) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis), who speaks with real personal experience in this area. Although we may not agree on the treatment for the diagnosis, I have huge respect for the insights he brings to the Chamber on this issue.

I do not think this particular motion should be controversial. I think it should be welcomed across the House that there is a desire to bring down the welfare bill among working-age people, because that is a compassionate position to take, and I will set out why I think that is compassionate. The opposite position lacks the compassion we should be showing those people who want to be establishing their working lives, who want to be contributing, and who want to have that independence and that ownership, because this all comes as part of the social contract that forms part of our society.

General taxation is there for the benefit of the whole of society, whether that is funding our police forces, our defence and the NHS, or supporting those who are vulnerable through the welfare state, but it is essential that the process is fair. The welfare system should be seen as a form of societal insurance and not a form of charity. It does not benefit anyone if we make them dependent upon a system opposed to enabling them to participate as fully as they can in our wider society. The fact that the Office for Budget Responsibility predicts that the total expenditure for working-age benefits will breach £220 billion by 2030-31 should be a matter of great concern to us all, as is the fact that the number of people not in education, employment or training has broken the 1 million barrier and has increased by some 60,000 since the start of this Parliament.

The Fonagy report, which has been referred to, provided some interesting statistics, particularly the fact that the population prevalence of conditions such as ADHD and other neurodiverse conditions has not increased in the last few years. What has happened, however, is there has been a much greater administrative prevalence of those conditions, and we have to ask questions about why that is the case.

There is also a legitimate conversation to be had about medicalising or over-medicalising neurodiversity. There are, of course, those individuals who suffer neurodiverse disorders to such an extent that they are unable to work and will be unable to work throughout their lives, but neurodiversity is actually a variance of human nature. We are not all built the same; we vary in our skillsets and our personalities. Neurodiversity is part of that picture, and we should be harnessing it to enable those young people to get into the workplace.

There is also an argument of fairness, because those who pay into the system want to know that it is being spent in a fair and equitable way—it is taxpayers’ money after all. Nobody begrudges those who genuinely need support from having it, but what they do begrudge is a situation—I have encountered this when speaking to young people in my constituency—in which young people have gone out and worked, and they have friends who were on the same university course, for example, who have then gone on to benefits and are financially in a better position than them.

That is not the way we should be supporting our young people. It does not allow them to grow or establish the full lives that we all want them to have. It also deeply damages that social contract with the wider public, because if an increasing number of people feel that the system no longer adequately distributes wealth and does not represent the importance of paying in and supporting those who belong in it, we will find that there will be a growing resentment—not against those who are unable to work, but against those who can work but choose not to do so. That fundamentally damages the reciprocity of the social contract of this country.

14:59

[Natasha Irons (Croydon East) (Lab)]

May life grant me the confidence, conviction, and lack of shame of a Conservative MP who is enraged by problems that they either helped to create or did nothing about when they had the chance. I do not think there has been a Conservative Government in my lifetime who have not said that they would cut welfare spending, and then attempted to blame their failure to do so on the sick, the poor and the young, and what we hear from the Opposition today is the same old approach, which would lead to the same old failures from the same old Tories.

I am old enough to remember when George Osborne promised us a high-wage, low-tax, low-welfare country. Instead, we saw child poverty skyrocket, food banks open in every community, young people written off, and a welfare bill that went up by a record £33 billion in the Conservatives’ last year in power alone. Opposition Members cannot be trusted to fix the welfare system, because they are unwilling to be honest about how the money would be spent, or to simply address the question of why people need support. They know full well that most of the welfare bill is spent on pensions, and that in the future, to protect pensions, decisions will have to be taken, such as on whether to adjust the triple lock. Instead, what we get from the Opposition is a bogus petition designed to stoke fear and division, proposals to push children back into poverty, and an open attack on the working poor. The Opposition’s proposals fail to acknowledge that 3.1 million people receiving universal credit this year are in work, that one in five working-age people receiving personal independence payments are in employment, and that 58% of households helped by the removal of the two-child benefit cap have at least one parent in work.

If we are genuinely to reduce dependency on welfare, we must tackle the things that make people need that support in the first place: low pay, poor health, the cost of housing and, perhaps most importantly, child poverty. As research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows, young people who experience persistent childhood poverty are 3.4 times more likely to be out of education and employment by the time they turn 23. That should concern every Member of this House, because poverty does not simply disappear when a child turns 18; it can shape their education, health and opportunities for the rest of their life. If we fail to address those barriers today, we risk creating greater costs for our welfare system tomorrow.

The sad thing is that everyone in this House agrees that the system can and should be fixed, because a system that spends £1 on support for every £25 on benefits is not right. Is it time to do this differently, and to work across the House to design a system that is about lifting people up, instead of writing them off? I am proud that this Labour Government have removed the two-child benefit cap and lifted half a million children out of poverty. I welcome the £3.5 billion investment in employment support for the sick and disabled. Reducing welfare dependency cannot simply mean reducing the support that people need; it should mean reducing the need for that support in the first place, and that cannot be achieved by the same old approach that leads to the same old failures from the same old Tories.

15:03

[Lara Bird (Arbroath and Broughty Ferry) (SNP)]

It is heartbreaking that we still have a such a large proportion of working poor in our society, and that so many people across my constituency, and the constituencies of others Members, are working hard, making sacrifices and doing their best, yet are still being punished by increasingly oppressive policies that take one look at the reality of hardship faced by folk, and decide to look the other way. One thing that is clear, and has always been clear, is that we cannot cut our way to prosperity—the Tories’ own record shows that to be true. The way to get the welfare bill down is not to arbitrarily pick targets and experiment with people’s lives to score political points, and it is genuinely insulting that Conservative Members can come here today and try to offer half-baked solutions to problems that they created.

This is largely a problem of the Conservative party’s own making. Conservative Members are trying to blame those in our society who rely on support because they cannot accept responsibility for their own actions. We must make it clear how misguided at best, or intentionally reckless at worst, the Conservative party is when it comes to welfare, because its austerity-fuelled cuts were linked directly to rising levels of poverty, and they have exacerbated the overall cost, long term. Anyone minded to listen to the Conservative party on their arbitrary welfare targets might need to seriously check themselves.

Of course we do not want people to rely on welfare long term, but there is a trend over past years—largely instigated by Conservative Members, but it is increasingly found wider afield—to blame those who rely on additional support for Government mismanagement, instead of recognising that many who receive such support are already valuable, contributing members of our society. This trend completely fails to address why so many working-age, motivated and skilled individuals still have no choice but to rely on additional support. Indeed, many people are able to contribute to our society and economy only because they receive additional support. Rather than blame those people, there must be more intense scrutiny of why so many people have to rely on that support, why so many are dependent on universal credit despite being in full-time employment, and why so many young people are relying on jobseeker’s allowance. It is not because they do not want to work and are not looking for work; it is because the Labour Government have priced them out of employment by creating such a hostile hiring environment. So many parents and families rely on the Scottish child payment because life is just so unaffordable.

I am especially concerned about young people who are coming of age today. A young person in my constituency who graduated from a university in England or Wales might have over £60,000 of debt, which they will likely be paying off for their entire life, and that amount will rise year on year because of interest. They have started paying that debt back earlier because Labour refused to amend the threshold freeze. A young person might not be able to find a job because the employer national insurance contribution hike is pricing young people out of work, or because of the refusal to cut VAT on hospitality, or because of the total mismanagement of minimum wage reforms. A young person could be paying more than £1,000 in energy bills; they are due to rise again in January, because of Labour’s choices. A young person who cannot afford to save knows that they will likely never buy a house, might never receive a state pension, and faces unaffordable monthly living costs.

As one of the youngest Members in this House, it is so frustrating to come here and hear others speaking about the reality for young people without actually understanding what they are facing, and to see the discrepancy between apparent support from the Government and the reality for young people in my constituency. Yes, I want the welfare bill to come down, but the way to reduce it is to introduce effective employment support. The SNP will not support the Opposition motion this afternoon, and it is laughable to think that anyone would take their lead when it comes to addressing the welfare budget.

15:07

[Sean Woodcock (Banbury) (Lab)]

I start by disappointing Conservative Members: I agree with some of what they are saying. The welfare bill is too high, and too many young people are not in education, employment or training; it is morally indefensible. The problem is that Conservative Members seem to have forgotten who was in charge when those trends first took hold. In their final year in office, the welfare bill rose by a record £33 billion. Listening to some of the speeches this afternoon, one might think that Conservative Members had spent 14 years campaigning against Conservative Governments. They are right to highlight the growing number of young people who are not in education, employment or training, but it is not a new problem. It did not begin last year, or in July 2024; it grew on their watch, and yes, it has continued since. Frankly, that should prompt some humility, not self-righteousness from Conservative Members.

I also agree with Conservative Members when they say that we need to spend much more on defence. What puzzles me, however, is the argument that all we need to do is cut welfare, and the defence budget will somehow take care of itself. If it is that easy, why did they not do it? They had 14 years in government, and over those 14 years, welfare spending rose while, in the words of a former Defence Secretary, our armed forces were “hollowed out”. What exactly are Conservative Members asking us to learn from their example—that it is entirely possible to end up with a growing welfare bill and shrinking military capability at the same time? Anyone on the Opposition Benches can demand cuts, but it is the responsibility of the Government to ensure that reform actually works.

Earlier this year, I brought together a group of young people from my constituency who were not in education, employment or training. Not one of them told me that welfare was the reason that they were out of work. They talked about poor or non-existent careers advice; artificial intelligence and the rapidly changing labour market; and struggling to get employers to give them a chance, because they lacked confidence or soft skills, in some cases. In other words, they talked about barriers. We can ignore those barriers and make speeches about random, crude cuts to welfare, or we can try to deal with them. I would much rather do the latter. Real welfare reform is not measured by how much money leaves the Treasury; it is measured by how many people can enter and remain in work.

The Opposition are right to demand welfare reform and stronger defence, but they have no right to pretend that they bear no responsibility for the position in which this country finds itself on either score. After their 14 years in government, the welfare bill had risen and our military was hollowed out. The country needs welfare reform and stronger defence, but demanding change is not the same as delivering it. The real test is whether more people find work, whether barriers are removed, and whether our armed forces are genuinely stronger. None of those challenges will be solved by that lot on the Opposition Benches pretending that the previous 14 years did not happen.

15:09

[Dr Kieran Mullan (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

I have a solemn duty to talk about an incredibly difficult and challenging statistic in relation to the prosperity of this country: the size and scale of worklessness in our country right now. Some 6.7 million working-age people are claiming benefits and are not in work. That is one in six of our working-age population. I do not know how anyone can hear that statistic and not be horrified by what it represents for the prosperity of a country that seeks to do well. Historically, that figure has been around one in 10. It causes me particular concern, for a number of reasons, that today’s figure is related to an increase in claims for mental health challenges and disabilities.

We have talked about the challenges of ensuring that people do not feel stigmatised or labelled in a way that will not be conducive to their finding work. When it comes to mental health conditions such as depression, we have to recognise that getting in work and getting a job is advantageous to someone’s mental health, and that not working is a disadvantage to their mental health. I am afraid that there is also the challenge of fraud in the benefits system. We all have to accept that the benign view of human nature that we have heard expressed by Government Members, in which no one is ever induced or encouraged to make a claim that might not reflect their reality, is naive in the extreme.

[Daniel Francis]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Dr Mullan]

Let me finish my point.

The fact is that mental health conditions are almost entirely self-reported. People are asked questions that relate to how they feel, what their mood is and what they can or cannot do, and we must accept that that inevitably has a risk of inducing or encouraging people to exaggerate their claims. The hon. Member for Ealing Southall (Deirdre Costigan) is not in her place any more, but she inadvertently accepted that point when she talked about the disability living allowance, and how the changes that were made encouraged people to put in higher claims. That in itself is admitting that people say or do different things depending on the available incentives.

We must not forget that a welfare system does not exist in isolation; it is part of a wider society. All of us face a complex mixture of incentives and disincentives to do the right thing. There will be people at either end of the spectrum, but a lot of people are at a point in between. That is why I support our policies, which make it very clear that when it comes to access to cash, being on benefits is not the same thing as being in work, and it should not be the same thing. I support our plans to make the welfare state more about helping and supporting people with the things that they need, rather than just giving them money. That is also why I support our plans on the two-child benefit cap. We should never create a situation in which people who are working have to make tough decisions that those on benefits are excluded from having to make.

Government Members like to say that benefits are claimed by people in work, which is true, but the claimant numbers do not reflect how the money is spent. More than 80% of the money spent is spent on people who are not in work. A much smaller proportion of expenditure is on people who are in work. That is why I support the idea that the system should have two tracks: a track for people who have put into the system, who can then fairly ask more of it when they are in need, versus a track for people who have never put into the system. These are the incentives and disincentives that we all interact with in society. When I meet and speak to people on the frontline who work with people who are in poverty and claiming the support of charities and other sectors, they are very clear about that. They will freely talk about the people who come to see them—the people who they think are legitimate and really in need, and the people who they think are not. That is why I find it so extraordinary that Government Members never seem to want to acknowledge what we all know is a real pressure in society.

[Daniel Francis]

We heard from the hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling) that 20 or 30 years ago, a person born with a brain injury would be unlikely to survive. Today, such people survive and live with a disability for the rest of their life—people like my daughter. Is the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Dr Mullan) really saying that because those people have never paid in or contributed, they are not entitled to any help from the state?

[Dr Mullan]

That is not the system that we propose. We are talking about people who have had an opportunity to contribute and have not done so; the system should take that into account. That is a fair and reasonable point to make.

[Natasha Irons]

The hon. Member is talking about contributions and people who have contributed. Does that include foreign nationals?

[Dr Mullan]

I do not think that foreign nationals should be entitled to benefits, because of the basis on which they are allowed into our country. The only reason they are allowed into our country is that they are net contributors. Why would we undermine that by allowing them to be net recipients of benefits? They are only here because they have signed up to the idea that they will come and be net contributors, so I do not think that that entitles them.

[Natasha Irons]

Just so that I am clear, if somebody is born in another country, comes here and gets citizenship or indefinite leave to remain, and has contributed to the system because they have been working, should they be able to claim from the system? That was my question. They may well have been a high earner, but they may have fallen on hard times and fallen back on the system that we all rely on, and they may have contributed to that system.

[Dr Mullan]

They are citizens, are they not? They have signed a deeper contract with the country that they are in, and they are here under a different set of circumstances. The hon. Member needs to be clearer when she asks her questions in relation to two different groups of people, because we treat them very differently in our proposals. There is a distinction.

Let me make a final point that is often not talked about enough. We are all incredibly focused on what the Government should do to help people and how taxpayers should help people. We know that for very many people in poverty, a big factor in that is having absent parents who give them absolutely no money or pitiful amounts of money for very many years. We also know that a large proportion of families with children who are in absolute poverty would not be in poverty if an absent parent who is not paying was paying.

I wish that there was as much focus on the dereliction of duty that parents too often show to their children and the complete failure for decades to tackle that issue, across all parties, as there is on what taxpayers and the state should deliver. That is a significant moral failing that we are too shy to talk about in this country, and it does not get the attention that it needs. If all parents, whether they have split up or are together, contributed to the upkeep of their children, we would see a lot less child poverty; I wish that MPs on all sides of the House were as invested in that issue as they are in deciding how much the state should pay in their place.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

With an immediate three-minute limit, I call Chris Curtis.

15:09

[Chris Curtis (Milton Keynes North) (Lab)]

Let me start on that last point. I am the proud son of a single mother, and I am probably standing here today only because of the support that she got from the last Labour Government.

There are three things that we as Members can agree on. First, the welfare bill is too high, and the trajectory is unsustainable. Spending on disability benefits alone has risen from £45 billion last year and is forecast to reach almost £70 billion by 2031-32. If we want to protect the welfare state, we must make it more sustainable. Secondly, we have a duty to protect those who cannot work and provide a safety net for those who work but have fallen on hard times. That is what the welfare state is for.

Thirdly, helping more people into work is good not only for the Treasury, but, as many people have said, for those individuals. Good work brings dignity, purpose, independence and often better health. That matters, because this debate is presented as a contrast between those who are willing to reform the welfare system and those who want the status quo, but I reject that. I believe in reforming the welfare state because I am a Labour politician, not despite it. The disagreement is on how we do that and the determination with which we push through changes.

We have seen that just announcing spending cuts does not achieve them. The Conservatives announced £11 billion of welfare cuts in 2010. In 2015, they promised another £12 billion. When they introduced PIP, they expected it to reduce spending by 20% compared with the system that it replaced; instead, the OBR said that it increased spending. Even before the pandemic, working-age disability benefits spending was rising by more than 5% a year in real terms. Announcing savings does not always lead to delivering them.

There are two reasons for that, both of which are relevant to the Opposition’s proposals. First, cutting one benefit can simply move the cost elsewhere. Take local housing allowance; the Opposition have announced that they are going to add extra limits to that, as well as reinstate the two-child benefit limit. Imagine a family with three young children who are already struggling to pay the rent. They could lose support for their third child while their housing allowance is pegged to a level that covers only the cheapest tenth of local properties. What happens is that they can now no longer afford their home. Quite rightly, I think there is consensus across the Chamber that we do not leave children sleeping on the pavement, and I do not believe the Opposition are arguing against that.

[David Simmonds]

The hon. Gentleman is talking about local housing allowance. The Prime Minister said that he felt a freeze in local housing allowance was simply a cost-shunt on to local authorities, but the Chancellor went ahead and did it anyway. Does the hon. Gentleman think the Chancellor was right, or was the Prime Minister right to criticise him?

[Chris Curtis]

I sit on the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, and we have discussed raising LHA a lot. However, the Conservatives’ proposal goes even further, and would ultimately have a real effect on the temporary housing bill. Last year, councils in England spent £2.9 billion on temporary accommodation. In London, the number of homeless children in such accommodation is equivalent to at least one in every classroom—if you cut in one place, it whacks the cost up somewhere else. That is before we get on to the wider costs, including disrupting schooling, parents being forced out of work, and pressure on the NHS.

Most horrifically of all, in the six years since 2019, 104 children died with temporary accommodation recorded as contributing to their vulnerability, ill health or death. Seventy-six of those children were under the age of one. We all accept that policies involve trade-offs, but that is probably one that we should all find pretty difficult to stomach. For the Conservatives to put forward such a policy without even having modelled its impact on temporary accommodation and wider impact on the welfare bill, shows that those proposals have not been well thought through.

Yes, we need to come up with sustainable ways to address the welfare bill. We will see more from the reviews that are coming forward, and I will be proud to support them.

15:22

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

From 2010 to 2024, every reform was opposed and every initiative was rebuffed by people who sat on the Opposition Benches. Labour Members remind me of St Augustine, because they try to tell us that they are now serious about welfare reform. Their prayer is “Make me a welfare reformer, but not yet”, because when they had the opportunity to introduce some reform, they rebelled. Keir Starmer blinked, the rebels got their way, and the reform agenda was kiboshed. The Prime Minister lost his authority, and the rest, as they say, is history. Do not take my word for it; the current Secretary of State for Work and Pensions told the whole world. He said that “Every meeting I have” with Labour MPs—not some, not the majority, but every meeting—

“is ‘Who can we tax in order to pay benefits to others?’”.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

Going back to the speech made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham (Priti Patel), when she was the Minister of State for Employment, I was her Parliamentary Private Secretary. We would sit through many a Westminster Hall debate secured by the Opposition, who are now the Government, complaining that we just were not spending enough. They said about every reform we brought forward, “Not good enough. You need to spend more.” There was never any attempt to reduce the welfare bill.

[Simon Hoare]

My right hon. Friend is right. As I said in an intervention on the hon. Member for Wirral West (Matthew Patrick), the Government had 14 years to plan for this great reform and modernisation of welfare, and they did nothing with it. They arrive in government, and precious little happens.

[Sean Woodcock]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Simon Hoare]

It gives me another minute, so why not?

[Sean Woodcock]

Is the hon. Gentleman’s position seriously that it is Labour’s fault that the welfare bill went up under the Conservatives?

[Simon Hoare]

No, that would be an asinine interpretation of what I have just said. The point I am making is that every time the Conservative party came up with a reform or a modernisation when in government, the gut reaction of the Labour party was to oppose it.

I happen to think that the welfare state is one of our crowning glories. It was brought in to address a number of deeply systemic societal problems, and it has been a tremendous force for good and transformation in our country. However, it is always intended to be a safety net, a permanent safety net for those who—as a result of disability, for example—find themselves unable to enter the workplace. It removes pressure and anxiety, and it gives people the dignity to live that they quite legitimately deserve, but it should never have been allowed under successive Administrations to become a cocoon. It has ceased to be a safety net; it has become a trap with perverse, Kafkaesque incentives, where the cumulative benefits an individual can receive are greater than anything they could hope to aspire to when getting into a job for the first time. I hope the House can agree that there is nothing kind or caring about trapping people in that sort of environment.

We all know—as various right hon. and hon. Members have mentioned in their speech—the fundamental importance and transformative nature of work for individuals, their families and their communities. It promotes a sense of self-respect, self-reliance, and being able to do things for yourself.

[Dr Mullan]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Simon Hoare]

I will not. The benefits of work are clear and unquestionable, yet we are trapping people through perverse incentives; if they earn an extra pound here or there, they suddenly lose a great slew of benefits. Surely—I say this to Members on the Treasury Bench—we will have to be far more imaginative and far more bespoke in how we approach welfare. We should be using digital and the raft of opportunities it offers to provide a far more bespoke, personally tailored network of support to get people back into work, rather than trapping them.

I want to say one thing about disability, as I had the honour of chairing the all-party parliamentary group for multiple sclerosis in the last Parliament. We will get more disabled people back into work because they want to stay in work—for all the reasons I have set out—if they have the confidence that they can ask their employer for reasonable adjustments, and if their employer has the confidence to ask what the employee might need in order to stay in work. Let us not have a slanging match across the two Dispatch Boxes; let us try to work cross-party. It will be good for the economy and good for our people up and down the land, and it will generate greater tax receipts to pay for the social services, defence and other areas that we want to see expenditure in. However, the status quo cannot be defended.

15:27

[Richard Baker (Glenrothes and Mid Fife) (Lab)]

What we should be talking about in this debate is root-and-branch reform of our welfare system, providing more opportunities for work for those who can work while protecting those who cannot. We should be talking about innovation and investment in employability to tackle the scourge of youth unemployment in our communities. What we should not have is the weaponisation of this debate and point scoring by a party whose record on this issue does not stand up to the slightest scrutiny.

On the Conservatives’ watch, spending on incapacity and disability benefits for working-age adults rose by £20 billion between 2019 and 2024, while progress on closing the disability employment gap stalled. When they left office, nearly 900,000 young people were not in education, employment or training and the disability employment gap stood at nearly 30%. The legacy in my constituency is that Fife has the fourth-lowest rate of 16 to 19-year-olds in education, training or work of Scotland’s 32 council areas. In Buckhaven and Methil in my constituency, one in eight of those aged 16 to 19 is a NEET, putting the area among the five worst wards in the whole of Scotland.

It is not rocket science to work out how that happened. We had a Conservative Government at Westminster failing to take the action required to provide more opportunities for our young people and to close the disability employment gap. Regrettably, we had an SNP Scottish Government cutting budgets for skills and training. I hope that Scottish Ministers will respond positively to the Prime Minister’s invitation to work with the UK Government to devolve powers and resources on employment to Scotland’s regions, as we are doing in England and Wales.

Importantly, this Government are not waiting for the final conclusions of the Milburn review, but are instead heeding the important call for change made in his interim report. We have the youth guarantee, backed by £1.5 billion of funding. We are introducing the youth jobs grant to incentivise employers to hire young people who have been on universal credit for six months. The Secretary of State recently had the opportunity to visit the youth hub in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for West Dunbartonshire (Douglas McAllister). Young people who had never worked before are already finding jobs as a result of the support they are receiving from the youth hub.

There is plenty of evidence of what works with employability support. The community trade hub in Buckhaven in my constituency is reaching young people who were non-attenders at school, but are now getting the skills they need for the work of the future. The brilliant Enable Works scheme, where I used to work, is bringing third sector organisations together with expertise in employability. Could the work of the third sector make an even greater contribution with this vital change for disabled people, for young people and for our country?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call the shadow Minister.

15:30

[Joe Robertson (Isle of Wight East) (Con)]

No welfare system stands the test of time in perpetuity. Loopholes appear in all well-intentioned systems. People test the system, and the world does not stand still. That is why the last Conservative Government came into office with a plan to tackle the welfare bill that had ballooned under Labour, and they did tackle welfare.

The right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms) asked earlier in this debate, “In which years under the last Conservative Government did the welfare bill come down?” I am happy to be able to assist him. Under the last Conservative Government, the working welfare bill came down in 2012. It came down in 2013. It came down in 2014. It came down in 2015. It came down in 2016. It came down in 2017. It came down in 2018. It came down in 2019. Between 2010 and 2019, the working welfare bill came down by a fifth. That is the legacy of the last Conservative Government’s reforms.

I live in the real world, and I accept that covid changed everything. It changed the relationship between the individual and the state. From that time, the welfare bill started to climb. Those were the conditions that Labour knew it would have to deal with as it came into government, and it failed to deliver. Labour did not even have a plan to tackle the welfare bill, which it knew had been climbing year on year since covid.

At least the last Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, cobbled together some form of plan. It was a pretty rubbish plan, but a year and a half ago he tried to get some crude cuts through the House of only £5 billion-worth of savings. He failed, though, because the same MPs sitting opposite me now on the Government Benches stopped him. The current Prime Minister came into office a few months ago and flirted with the idea of bringing down the welfare bill, but he has given up entirely and he is proud of it. He is so proud that he will not bring the welfare bill down that he has ruled it out for the remainder of this Parliament.

The right hon. Member for East Ham has been tasked with finding savings, and he is about to publish his review into PIP. We know what will be in that review when it comes to savings: absolutely nothing, because the Prime Minister has already ruled it out. The Labour party is the welfare party. Its Members are proud of welfare spending going up and up. Just a few hours ago, at the Dispatch Box, the Prime Minister criticised our party’s plan to save £36 billion because it will hit incomes during a cost of living crisis. The system of benefits and personal independence payments is not intended to be an income top-up. It is not even means-tested. It is there to help people with a genuine need to meet the daily cost of a disability. I am afraid that the Prime Minister’s mask has slipped if he thinks it is there to serve as an income top-up during a cost of living crisis of his own making.

Let me now deal with some of the contributions from Labour Members. The hon. Member for Wirral West (Matthew Patrick) brought up the subject of child poverty. The best way to help hard-working families tackle child poverty is to make sure that they have well-paid jobs—to get off the backs of wealth creators, get off the backs of business and reverse the harmful job tax, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas) has asked.

[Daniel Francis]

The hon. Member has accepted from the Dispatch Box that the Conservatives did completely lose control of the budget, but will he also accept that, contrary to what they keep saying on the airwaves and in the House, the numbers increased more between spring 2022 and spring 2024 than they did between spring 2020 and spring 2022? Moreover, covid was not the cause; the cause was the fact that, at the back end of their Government, they lost control of the economy, they lost control of our borders, they lost control of the SEND system, and they lost control of DWP budgets.

[Joe Robertson]

I fundamentally disagree with the hon. Member’s claim that covid and its legacy had no effect. I think he should go back and think again about what life was like during covid and in the aftermath.

I turn now to our plan. We will not make the mistake that the Labour party made in opposition. We will not sit by and let a system become more and more unfair without doing the hard graft. As my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull West and Shirley (Dr Shastri-Hurst) pointed out, it is not fair to leave the system as it is. Our plan includes £36.1 billion of welfare savings to help get Britain working. Ensuring support for people with genuine need is at the heart of it, and we will provide £1 billion for people with lower-level mental health conditions. That is new money to help them and ensure that we can make savings of £16.5 billion by removing them from the cash handout system, giving them the therapeutic support that they need instead.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Joe Robertson]

My time is short, so let me finish by addressing the critics head-on: those who say that we do not understand—that we do not understand mental health, and that I do not understand what it is like to live with a neurodevelopmental disorder. Well, I do know what it is like. I have an ADHD diagnosis, but I have never been told that I cannot do something, and I have never been told that I need more help to do it. My condition was undiagnosed for 30 years. People with ADHD do not need a disabled persons railcard, they do not need a Motability car, and most of them do not need a cash payment every month to meet the cost of a disability for ADHD alone.

The Government need to stop thinking of new ways to give more people more things. Instead, we need to ensure that people have access to therapeutic community support to help them to live, learn, train, work, and get on in life. That is good for the economy, it is good for society and, most of all, it is good for the individuals involved. That is not the Labour way; it is the Conservative way.

15:37

[The Minister for Employment (Andrew Western)]

Given that time is short, I hope that my hon. Friends will forgive me for not being able to respond at length and reflect on the excellent contributions that we have heard. However, I want to thank my hon. Friend the Member for Gloucester (Alex McIntyre)—whom, of course, I will meet, as he requested—and my hon. Friends the Members for Wirral West (Matthew Patrick), for Ealing Southall (Deirdre Costigan), for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis), for Croydon East (Natasha Irons), for Banbury (Sean Woodcock), for Milton Keynes North (Chris Curtis) and for Glenrothes and Mid Fife (Richard Baker) for their passionate speeches. In particular, I want to highlight the contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Michael Payne), whose demolition job on the Opposition’s proposals was truly something to behold.

In her opening speech, the shadow Secretary of State suggested that it was a little early for the panto season. However, people could be forgiven for their confusion, given that the Tories have rushed out their Christmas wish list of cuts somewhat early this year. Before turning to those particular proposals, however, I want to comment on some of the other points made by the shadow Secretary of State.

We agree that the number of unemployed young people is unacceptable. The number of young people not in education, employment or training was, of course, up by 250,000 in their final three years in office. We commissioned the Milburn review, the youth guarantee and the youth jobs grant because we are determined to right their wrong.

The hon. Lady said that reforming welfare is not cruel. Again, I agree with her, but the Conservatives’ plans are not welfare reform; they are cruel cuts. She said that we cancelled their reforms, but it is worth remembering that their 2023 consultation on reforming the work capability assessment was ruled unlawful.

Let us turn to some of the specific proposals in the plans that the hon. Lady spoke to, which would push hundreds of thousands of children into poverty. Half a million young people would be impacted by the Conservatives’ proposal to reinstate the two-child limit, with well over half the children affected in families that are in work. The Child Poverty Action Group has said that the Tories’ measures, including the reinstatement of the two-child limit, would cause

“the biggest overnight increase in child poverty since records began.”

It is absolutely shameful.

The Conservatives’ changes to housing benefit would exacerbate homelessness and add costs. They have proposed to reduce local housing allowance to the 10th percentile of local rent, instead of the current 30th percentile. Expert organisations have said that this would dramatically increase homelessness, as well as displacing costs to local authorities, the NHS and other public services. The director of the Chartered Institute of Housing says:

“At a time when record numbers of households are already struggling with housing costs, this would almost certainly increase financial hardship and homelessness. Any short-term savings to the welfare bill could quickly be outweighed by higher costs to councils, the NHS and other public services”.

[Lincoln Jopp (Spelthorne) (Con)]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way on welfare bill savings. Can he confirm that the Labour party’s 10-year plan will contain detailed plans for reducing the bill?

[Andrew Western]

As the hon. Gentleman is aware, we have been clear that we will set out our proposals for welfare reform next year. They will be scored by the OBR in the usual way.

Turning back to the Conservatives’ proposed changes to local housing allowance, I have already quoted the Chartered Institute of Housing. I rather prefer the slightly snappier comments of the chief executive of Shelter, who said:

“Making more families homeless does not save the government money.”

It is not rocket science, but it needs explaining to some Members of this House.

The Conservatives have not said what would happen to British people, including children in households that contain foreign nationals. They have not set out how a household with a foreign national and a British citizen partner would be treated. Universal credit is, of course, a household benefit. Would that household be treated as a single person claim, instead of a couple claim? Would the household lose all eligibility? What about households containing foreign national adults living with British citizen children? Would the Tories’ policy on foreign nationals hit the income and living standards of British people? From the information available to us at present, it certainly seems that that would be the case.

Let us turn to the laughably ambitious £13.7 billion that the Conservatives claim they can save by reforming disability and sickness benefit. They say that this would be achieved by introducing more detailed and holistic assessments with tighter eligibility criteria, but the current contracts, which they signed us up to, run until 2029. They say that they can deliver all this by 2030, yet those contracts include a target for face-to-face assessments of just 20%. It is undeliverable.

Of course, that is before one considers that the Conservatives’ costings are predicated on claimants’ primary condition only. The shadow Secretary of State quoted the IFS, which has been very clear that most people in the cohorts that the Conservative party hopes to take benefits away from actually have multiple conditions, and often three or four. The Tories have no idea what those people’s conditions are, so the numbers are just total fantasy. Overall, they refuse to say how many households or individuals would lose out.

The hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) said that the Conservatives were protecting pensioners. That is not the case, because the transition from PIP to attendance allowance that they will force on people reaching pension age could cost somebody up to £4,160 a year. That would be someone on the higher rate of PIP for both daily living and mobility moving on to the higher rate of attendance allowance, so it could in some cases be more. I suspect that the Conservatives do not know how many people would be affected, I suspect they do not have a precise figure for how much it will save, and I fully expect—now I have pointed out that they are not, in fact, protecting pensioners—that that proposal will disappear, because many of these things do not stand up to scrutiny.

The challenge with the proposals the Conservatives have put forward is that they are not worth the paper they are written on. A serious Opposition would have done their homework properly, but what do we have instead? They claim to have a plan for welfare that works, but who exactly does it work for? Not for the children plunged into poverty, not for the taxpayers who have to foot the cost, not for the pensioners who face a £4,000 cliff edge and not for the households facing homelessness. We know how punitive policies turn out: more hardship, less opportunity and more pressure on the welfare state. This Government will not repeat the Conservatives’ mistakes. We are fixing the broken welfare system they left in their wake, and ensuring that everyone gets the support they need so that they can fulfil their potential and truly have a better future.

Question put (Standing Order No. 31(2)), That the original words stand part of the Question.

15:45

Division 119

Question accordingly negatived.

Ayes: 92

Noes: 279

Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 31(2)), That the proposed words be there added.

15:59

Division 120

Question accordingly agreed to.

Ayes: 268

Noes: 93

The Deputy Speaker declared the main Question, as amended, to be agreed to (Standing Order No. 31(2)).

Resolved,

That this House notes that the previous Government left over one million young people not in education, employment or training, while overseeing a £33 billion rise in the welfare bill in its final year alone; recognises that since the General Election one million more people are in work and 397,000 more people are economically active; welcomes the imminent publication of the Milburn and Timms reviews; and supports the Government’s commitment to deliver welfare reforms that break down barriers to employment, support more people into good, secure work and bring down the benefits bill.