Welfare

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Wednesday 11th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[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”.

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[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.

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[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.

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[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.

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[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

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

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[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.

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[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.