Welfare Expenditure

Baroness Stedman-Scott Excerpts

Thursday 15th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

My Lords, obviously the noble Lord will understand that I cannot comment on an individual case. But I can assure him that the department is aware of cases and looks into them. There is no question that there had been backlogs on assessments building up for years. One of the problems we have is that the number of people applying for sickness and disability benefits has been going up steadily—at a very significant rate, as I said, under the last Government. We have begun to bend it under this one. The way we have to make a difference is by doing two things. One is to address the incentives at source. That is why we have rebalanced the universal credit rates to reduce the amount going to those on sickness and disability benefits compared with those who are not, to try to redirect people to make sure that they go into work. The second is to make sure that the system is fit for purpose. We know that PIP is not fit for purpose, the Timms review made that very clear, so when we get that report out, we will look at how the system is working and how we can put it right.

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

My Lords, there is agreement among many in the House, but not all, that the welfare bill must be brought down. But when people who want to come off benefits are told, “No” or “Not yet”, how confident is the Minister that the Government will achieve this?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

One thing I would point out is that although overall spending on social security in this Parliament is still going up—the noble Baroness is right—it is rising at half the rate that it was in the last Parliament. The previous Government tried all kinds of things. They created PIP in the first place, to replace the previous system. What happened? The numbers and the spend simply kept going up. We have to get the system doing the right thing in the first place. We have to get people working, work out what is getting in the way and address that at root cause. We are doing lots of things in the short term, which I have already described at great length, and I have written to the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, many times, I accept that, but the reason we asked Alan Milburn and Stephen Timms to do reports is because we have to review things at source. We are going to be doing that, and we will respond in the near future.