Universal Credit (Removal of Two Child Limit) Bill

Helen Whately Excerpts

2nd reading & Money resolution
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Commons Chamber

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

Every week, millions of people up and down the country sit at their kitchen table and do the sums to work out what is coming in, what is going out, and what simply is not affordable. Sometimes the conversation may take a more serious turn to one of life’s biggest decisions: “Shall we start a family?” or “Can we afford another child?” Though romantics might love that to be a decision about whether people want the joy of bringing new life into this world, the reality is that many ask themselves, “Can we afford it?” They are not looking to someone else to help them make ends meet or pick up the bill; they are just doing the maths. That is a difficult conversation, but Members have to ask themselves a simple question before we vote: why should people on benefits get to avoid the hard choices faced by everyone else?

Let us be clear about what the two-child cap is and what it is not. The two-child cap restricts the additional universal credit a household can get to the amount for two children, with carefully considered exceptions, such as twins or non-consensual conception. It does not apply to child benefit. It says that there is a limit, and a point at which it is simply not fair to make taxpayers fund choices that they themselves cannot afford to make.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

What does the shadow Secretary of State have to say to my constituent, who found herself single with three children in temporary accommodation and then moved into a one-bedroom flat? In those overcrowded conditions, her youngest got ill, and she had to give up her good job to look after that child. This Bill is a lifeline for her. She wants to go back to work, but it is difficult. She did not choose to be in that situation—it was not a choice. And, for the record, most of my constituents do not have space for a kitchen table.

[Helen Whately]

I am sure that all of us in this House care about poverty and children’s prospects, but the answer is not to spend more, to hand out more money and to trap people in worklessness; the answer is to support people to work, and that is exactly the opposite of what the hon. Lady’s Government are doing.

We all know that bringing up children is expensive and important, but when working couples are having to make tough decisions about whether they can afford to start a family at all, they should not be asked to pay higher taxes to fund someone else to have a third, fourth or fifth child. Someone who is in work does not get a pay rise because they have another child. If we are serious about avoiding a benefits trap, whereby it pays more to be on welfare than in work, we should be honest about what happens if we lift the two-child cap. Benefits for individual households will rise by thousands. Nearly half a million households will receive around £5,000 more on average. A single parent on universal credit with five children could get an extra £10,000 without doing any work, taking their household income to more than £45,000, untaxed—people have to earn about £60,000 to get that income from work! Around 75,000 households will get between £10,000 and £21,000 extra as a result of this Bill. For some households, the extra money will be more than a full-time income, after tax, for someone on the minimum wage.

[Joy Morrissey (Beaconsfield) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is an issue of fairness for the taxpayer if people are working hard in a job but being rewarded less than someone else getting benefits? That is why we need to keep the two-child benefit cap.

[Helen Whately]

It is exactly as my hon. Friend says. The extra money that some families will be receiving—without even working—would require such a high income to achieve through work. This simply exacerbates the poverty trap.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

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[Helen Whately]

I will give way to Members on the Government Benches in a moment. I just ask them to think about the implications of the extra money that people will be receiving. Some people will—frankly and factually—calculate that they can boost their income far more by having children than by working. The best way out of poverty will not be work—[Interruption.] Government Members do not like to hear this, but I am afraid it is just rational. The best way out of poverty will not be work; it will be having babies.

I want to address the argument that lifting the cap is necessary because women are not having enough babies. We know that a declining birth rate is a cause for concern, but falling birth rates are driven by many factors, including changes in people’s aspirations, the poor jobs market, the cost of housing and childcare, the penalties that motherhood imposes on careers and the changing nature of 21st-century relationships. Children are important and we need to have more, but the answer to that complex problem is not, “Here’s some cash for having a kid.”

[John Grady]

We in the Treasury Committee looked at this issue extensively, and I am unaware of any particular evidence that supports the behavioural arguments the hon. Lady is setting out. In any event, why should 95,000 bright and talented children in Scotland be punished by an utterly cruel policy? Is it not fatuous to suggest that people are having children for money, as well as insulting to people in Glasgow and across the United Kingdom?

[Helen Whately]

The fact is that people do the sums. That is the reality of the world we live in. The hon. Gentleman indicated that he is a member of the Treasury Committee, so he must be interested—even though he is looking at his phone—in these unavoidable questions. Where will the £3 billion to fund this Bill come from? Where will the £14 billion over a five-year period come from? We all know where it will come from: taxpayers—either today’s or tomorrow’s—and the men and women who get up every morning, go to work, pay their bills and do the right thing. In the last Budget, as she knows, the Chancellor made a deliberate political choice: to raise taxes on people who work and save, so that millions who do not work will receive more in benefits. Working families already make hard choices. Many already strive and struggle to live within their means. This Bill asks them to shoulder even more.

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

The shadow Secretary of State must know that the vast majority of families in poverty include at least one adult in work. She asks how this Bill is being paid for. Well, it is being paid for by increased taxes on gambling giants. Would it not be more truthful to say that the hon. Lady is on the side of gambling giants rather than children in poverty?

[Helen Whately]

Unfortunately, the hon. Lady does not seem to understand that hypothecated taxes are not a thing. What she has said simply does not make sense. The fact is that this Bill will cost the Government money, so it will cost taxpayers money, either now or in the future. That is simply the way it works.

[Sir Desmond Swayne (New Forest West) (Con)]

I have a question too.

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[Helen Whately]

I would be delighted to hear it.

[Sir Desmond Swayne]

We now hear shouts of “cruelty” and “the rape clause”, but I see only one of the seven who were suspended sitting on the Labour Benches. The rest of them kept their heads down and voted to perpetuate what they now call cruelty and the rape clause. How do they sleep at night?

[Helen Whately]

My right hon. Friend has indeed made a significant point about the strange position in which so many Labour Members find themselves. Having previously voted against lifting the cap, here they are now, delighted about lifting it.

Labour Members say that the Bill will end child poverty. They have read that increasing handouts will decrease the metric called relative poverty. However, relative poverty is a deeply misleading measure. It is not an accurate measure of living standards. It tells us nothing about whether people have enough to live on, or whether children will have better life chances. It can get worse when the country gets richer, even when living standards for the very poorest are rising, and it can look better when people are getting poorer. That is not progress; it is levelling down. Throwing money at one flawed metric is not a strategy. In fact, it risks doing the opposite of what Ministers claim to want, trapping families in long-term dependency rather than lifting them out of it.

There is a proven way in which to improve children’s life chances, and that is work. Work allows parents to provide for their families, to pay the rent or mortgage, to put food on the table and clothes on their children’s backs, to set an example to their children, and to create structure and routine in their households. The Centre for Social Justice has found that children in workless households are four times more likely to be materially deprived, but under this Government the number of children growing up in workless households has risen at the fastest rate on record, and has now reached 1.5 million. Contrast that with our record, Madam Deputy Speaker. From 2014 onwards, the number of children in workless households fell year on year. We lifted a million people out of absolute poverty, including 100,000 children, and we drove unemployment down to historic lows.

Under this Labour Government, unemployment is rising month after month, so, sadly, the number of children in workless households will continue to increase. Inflation is up as well, to almost double the level that the Government inherited. Higher inflation means that the money in your pocket is worth less: in other words, you are poorer. Fewer jobs, more unemployment, a higher cost of living—that is what the Government are doing to people. I say this to them: you do not lift children out of poverty by making the whole country poorer.

[Stuart Anderson (South Shropshire) (Con)]

I am enjoying listening to Members who say they have met constituents who have suffered hard times. I grew up in hard times, on welfare, through the death of a parent, watching my mum go without food to feed us. There is no possible way, given that the cuts to benefits have been pulled, that the country can afford this. We will have no defence of the realm. South Shropshire residents will start going without. There is no feasible way to fund this measure, whichever way Labour Members look at it. Does my hon. Friend agree with me?

[Helen Whately]

My hon. Friend has made the important point that no other party in the Chamber seems to realise what a serious financial position the country is in. We have to ask ourselves hard questions about what the country can afford.

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

We on the Labour Benches at least understand the historical consistency:186 years ago the Tories made economic arguments against stopping children being sent up chimneys, and 186 years later they are making the same arguments, about stopping children being put into poverty. Same old Tories, nearly 200 years later!

[Helen Whately]

If the hon. Gentleman listens to what I am about to say about the back and forth on this policy on his side of the House, he will see that he should think a bit harder before talking about “consistency”.

So what is this Bill really about? If Labour truly believes that lifting the two-child limit is essential to tackling poverty, why did it take the Prime Minister 18 months to do it? Years ago he called the cap “punitive” and promised to scrap it, but then, once he had secured the leadership of the Labour party, he changed that tune. He said that Labour was not going to abolish the two-child limit. His Chancellor, who is sitting on the Front Bench, said that it was unaffordable. Just six months ago, the Government even suspended the whip from MPs who voted to lift the cap, but now that the Prime Minister’s leadership is under threat, it is the end for the cap. How long will it be before he goes the same way? That is the real reason we are debating the Bill today: we have a weak Prime Minister, running scared from his left-wing Back Benchers.

Talking of the left wing, I expect that Labour will be joined in the Division Lobby later by some of the Opposition Members sitting to the left of me. No doubt the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish National party and Plaid Cymru will also be competing to see who can be the most generous with other people’s money. Reform UK has jumped on the welfare spending bandwagon too. You will have noticed, Madam Deputy Speaker, that we have not tabled a reasoned amendment today, not because we think that the Bill is perfect—I hope that is clear—but because any amendment would still leave us with a watered-down version of the cap. Other parties have got in a right muddle on this—one in particular—but to us it is clear and simple: the cap should stay. Anything else is a worse policy. Amending the Bill is not the right answer; the House should just vote it down.

First and foremost, I have argued against the Bill on the grounds of fairness, but there is another reason to vote against it. More than 50% of households now receive more from the state than they pay in. The benefits bill is ballooning. Health and disability benefits alone are set to reach £100 billion by the end of the decade—more than we spend on defence, education or policing. The benefits bill is a ticking time bomb. We have to start living within our means. Other parties are simply in denial about the situation that we face in our country. The Conservatives are the only party that recognises how serious this is. We would not be spending more on benefits; in fact, we have explained how we would be saving £23 billion. We would stop giving benefits to foreign nationals, stop giving benefits for lower-level mental health problems and milder neurodiversity, stop the abuse of Motability, and bring back face-to-face assessments. We would get the benefits bill under control, and back people to work.

Labour claims to be compassionate, but there is nothing compassionate about making welfare the rational choice, nothing compassionate about rewarding dependency over work, and nothing compassionate about saddling working families with higher taxes to fund political U-turns. Outside this place, people can see what is happening. They know when a system is unfair. They know when a Government have lost their way. They know when a Prime Minister’s time is up. Members should not be enticed by his final throws. They should step back and do what is right for the country. They should back people who do the right thing, back jobs and work and lower taxes, and back living within our means and raising the standard of living for everyone, rather than backing a policy that will add billions to the benefits bill and trap parents in a downward spiral of dependency. This Bill does not end poverty. It entrenches it, so we oppose it.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee.

Youth Unemployment

Helen Whately Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2026 Commons Chamber

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

I beg to move,

That this House regrets that both youth unemployment and the numbers of young people not in education, employment or training are rising as a result of the Government’s policies, such as increasing the rate of employer’s National Insurance contributions, reducing business rates relief for 2025-26 for retail, leisure and hospitality businesses, and passing the Employment Rights Act 2025; notes that these policies have heavily impacted the retail, leisure and hospitality sectors where young people often have their first job; further regrets that the Government’s inability to reform the welfare system will mean that young people struggling to find work are more likely to become trapped in welfare benefits dependency; and calls on the Government to back business, scrap business rates for pubs and high street shops, and back job opportunities for young people.

This afternoon we are here to talk about young people—the young people who wake up every morning with nowhere to go: no classroom, no workplace, no sense that today will be different from yesterday. It is part of our job to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. Today, those are the shoes of a young man or woman who has just left school, college or university, and is setting out on real life in the world of work. That should be a moment of liberation, trepidation and excitement because the world is at their feet, but right now, for hundreds of thousands of young people, it is not.

Just a few days ago, I was with a constituent who has just finished school. She is great; she has GCSEs and A-levels, she has done work experience, and she is charming and presentable. She has been applying for jobs day after day, but can she get one? Not a squeak—and that is in the bustling and vibrant economy of the south-east of England. She told me that it can be lonely being stuck at home all day applying for jobs, but she is not alone; she is in the company of many thousands of young people. Over 700,000 young people are unemployed—more than the entire population of Sheffield—and the figures are getting worse. Our youth unemployment rate is rising faster than that of any other G7 country. Nearly 1 million young people are not in education, employment or training, and over 700,000 university graduates are on out-of-work benefits.

Those are not just statistics; they are lives knocked off course—young women and men putting in hundreds of job applications and getting hundreds of rejections. They are getting knocked back again and again, and signing on to benefits because they see no other way. They are missing out on the chance to have money in their pockets that they have earned themselves, on the first step towards independence, and on the experience gained in the early years in work, on which future working lives are built. Forget saving to buy a first car or home; dreams and ambitions are being shot to pieces. These people are becoming Britain’s lost generation.

[Tulip Siddiq (Hampstead and Highgate) (Lab)]

I have a lot of sympathy for the situation that the hon. Lady describes. The number of people who are NEET is very high, but that trend started in 2021, when her party was in government—the election was not until two years ago. Why did the Conservatives not do anything about the situation then?

[Helen Whately]

I am glad that the hon. Lady has some sympathy with the position of young people who are struggling to get jobs. My party halved unemployment; her party’s record is of unemployment going up and up. Since Labour has been in power, unemployment has gone up every single month.

What is going on? What is going on is them: the Labour Government. Same old Labour—in they come and up go taxes and up goes unemployment, every single time. They put taxes up by £36 billion in their first Budget, and not just any old taxes. Their national insurance hike was specifically a tax on employment—literally a jobs tax. If you tax it, you will get less of it. That is not rocket science; it is basic economics.

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

UKHospitality says that we could be seeing the death of the great British summer job, and even Labour’s own Alan Milburn has warned that there is a long-standing decline in the number of 16 and 17-year-olds getting Saturday jobs. Previous Labour Governments always shoved up youth unemployment, but never before has Labour threatened to destroy the great British summer job. That is much to be regretted, and it is about time that the Government turned around their jobs tax and Employment Rights Bill policies.

[Helen Whately]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. Summer and holiday jobs are important ways for young people to gain experience before they leave education and seek full-time jobs, but there has been a shocking decline in the availability of such jobs because of this Government, who have increased regulation and the cost of employment—that is exactly the problem.

On exactly the point about regulation and red tape, the Employment Rights Bill is making it harder for businesses to employ people. Labour says that it wants to achieve growth, but its policies are obviously going to achieve the exact opposite. The problem is that Labour Members do not understand business. Have they any idea how hard it is to break even, let alone to make a profit; any idea how hard it is for people who have started a business to bring in enough to cover the payroll each month, never mind pay themselves; or any idea how hard it is for business owners to make their staff redundant because they cannot afford to keep paying them? Of course they do not, because how many Labour Front Benchers have worked in a business—I am not counting union officials—let alone run one?

[Alex McIntyre (Gloucester) (Lab)]

As my previous career was in advising businesses up and down the country, I take some issue with the hon. Lady’s point that there is no experience among Labour Members. She says that taxes, particularly the rise in national insurance, are causing the rise in youth unemployment, but does she know at what level of income young people, specifically those under 21, start to attract national insurance contributions?

[Helen Whately]

I am perfectly well aware of the policy on national insurance. I take the hon. Gentleman’s point that some Labour MPs do have business experience, but if we look at Labour Front Benchers, particularly those in the Cabinet, we will see that they are few and far between. If he has been talking to businesses—he clearly knows some—he will hear them say, as they have said directly to me and many of my hon. Friends, that it is the Labour Government’s policies that are making it so hard and so expensive to employ people, particularly young people. Even if Government Members do not have business experience, they could and should listen to what businesses have been telling them.

For instance, Kate Nicholls of UKHospitality said that Labour’s 2024 Budget did “unthinkable damage” to the sector. She was backed up by her colleague, Allen Simpson, who said recently that if the Government continue their approach,

“we will only see job losses and business closures accelerate.”

That sector has shed over 100,000 jobs under this Government.

Jane Gratton, from the British Chambers of Commerce, said that Labour’s policies are

“deeply worrying for employers. They will increase employment costs, complexity and risk for firms, particularly SMEs…Government needs to help not hinder businesses”.

That is the crux of the matter: Labour sees businesses as a cash cow, not as the engine of the economy, and young people in particular are suffering as a result.

Before businesses start letting people go, they generally stop hiring, and that is what they are doing. And when they stop hiring, who gets hit hardest? Young people. By hitting hospitality—all those pubs and cafés where people get their first jobs—the Government are hitting young people again. The simple fact is that there are fewer jobs for young people under this Government. This unemployment disaster for young people is not something that has just happened on this Labour Government’s watch—it is a disaster of their making.

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

My hon. Friend makes the point so well. It is deeply worrying that in the Walsall borough, in my constituency, youth unemployment is higher than the national average. The truth is that youth unemployment has skyrocketed under Labour’s watch. Does my hon. Friend agree that a big part of the problem is that we have a Labour Government who do not understand that the more they squeeze business, the more they squeeze job opportunities for young people?

[Helen Whately]

My right hon. Friend makes the point so clearly. It is so obvious to the Conservatives, as the party of business, that if the Government keep taxing business, there will be fewer jobs—but they just do not seem to get it.

Labour Members do know that they are in trouble, though. That is why they are talking up their youth programmes, youth hubs and youth guarantees—[Laughter.] Labour Members are laughing, but they should listen. The hon. Member for Exeter (Steve Race) says from a sedentary position that it was our programme —exactly that! Most of these things are just rebrands of programmes that the Conservatives started. We started youth hubs. Changing the name of the youth offer to the “youth guarantee” does not solve the problem. Of course there is part to play for training programmes and work placements in helping people to bridge the gap between school and work, but Government programmes are not the answer to the fundamental problem. Young people want jobs, and this Government are killing jobs.

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

The shadow Secretary of State is obviously well known for speaking clearly and candidly, which is refreshing. Can she clearly and candidly answer these questions? Which rights does she think young people should be denied in order to get into work? By how much would she cut the minimum wage to facilitate those young people getting back into work? Unfortunately, she cannot have it both ways. She has just made the point that those rights are hindering business, so what would she do to cut them? Will she make a clear commitment at the Dispatch Box?

[Helen Whately]

I enjoyed the way in which the hon. Gentleman led into his question with a bit of flattery, but I will not be drawn on his attempt to make me talk about the minimum wage or down the routes that he asks me to take, as much as he may love me to do so.

However, I will talk about our record in government. We halved unemployment. We got record numbers of people into work. We backed businesses to create 800 jobs for every day that we were in government. We reformed welfare to make work pay. We brought down the benefits bill. None of those things are on the cards under this Labour Government. They are crushing businesses with taxes and red tape, destroying jobs and driving up unemployment. They U-turned on welfare savings and put up taxes on working people by £26 billion at the last Budget to pay for the ballooning benefits bill.

I will not argue that we got everything right. Some of the graduates struggling to get jobs have degrees that are not actually of any help to them, and they took those degrees when we were in government. Under us, through the pandemic and afterwards, the number of young people dropping out of work and on to benefits because of their mental health went up. We wanted to end the stigma around mental illness, but the consequences have been far-reaching. Our welfare system was not designed to support people with milder mental health problems or milder neurodiversity, or for a time when a quarter of people report themselves as disabled.

The system is not working; instead, it is funnelling people off work and on to benefits. Now, with the Government’s failure to reform welfare, young people are stuck in a benefits trap—they are better off on benefits and fearful of losing them if they get a job. Let us add to that the stress and misery of trying and failing again and again to get a job, because jobs are fewer and farther between. Most young people I have spoken to do not want to be on benefits, but that is where they are ending up.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Lady at least welcome the job guarantee for 18 to 21-year-olds? Does she think that that represents this Government working with employers such as the Premier League and the FA to create opportunities? Is that not in stark contrast with her Government, who watched opportunities disappear while they did FA?

[Helen Whately]

If the hon. Gentleman had been listening, he would have heard me say that there is a place for programmes that support young people into work, particularly if they find that they do not have the skills needed to do the jobs in their area. When we were in government, we had programmes like that, and those programmes are being continued under this Government.

However, there is a fundamental problem with the idea and concept of a youth guarantee, which has wobbled a bit at different announcements and different times. The problem is that the Government are trying to guarantee somebody a job, but destroying the jobs that businesses are creating. The right way to solve the problem is to back businesses to create jobs, not take some kind of socialist, communist or even Marxist approach and create a job with taxpayers’ money so that somebody is in work.

The situation is looking pretty bleak. That is a disaster for a generation of young people and our economy, but it does not have to be like this. Even in a world of artificial intelligence, there is another way. It starts with backing businesses, because they are the ones that create jobs, and cutting taxes, cutting red tape, scrapping the swathes of regulation that stop businesses giving young people a summer job or a Saturday shift, and getting government out of the way so that young people can get on.

I welcome the Government’s U-turn on probation periods—many businesses told me that that policy would have deterred them from taking a chance on a young person. I also welcome the Government’s latest U-turn on business rates for pubs How many U-turns are we on? Is it 13? What about the rest of hospitality? Why not adopt our policy and scrap business rates, not just for pubs, but for high street shops too? I ask the Minister not just to send young people off on more training courses or work experience schemes. What young people want now is jobs. Why not adopt our policy to double the number of apprenticeships and end debt-trap degrees, too?

We do not have to have a lost generation, but we need a Government who will make different choices—who will back businesses to create jobs, scrap degrees that do not pay back, reform welfare so that it pays to work, help this generation make their way in life, and get our country working again.

Oral Answers to Questions

Helen Whately Excerpts

Monday 26th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

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

Since the right hon. Gentleman became Disability Minister, half a million more people have gone on to PIP, and the sickness benefits bill is heading up to £100 billion a year by the end of this decade. We know that his review is not due to serve up any savings, but there must come a point where even he would say that the country cannot afford this. Does he have any ambition to make welfare savings?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

We have already made some important changes. For example, we have removed a serious disincentive to work that was created in the universal credit system by the last Government. That has gone, thanks to the changes in the Universal Credit Act 2025, which finished its passage last summer. Those changes will take effect in April. We do have a broken system—the hon. Lady is absolutely right about that—but it is the system that was left behind by the last Government; and, yes, we are determined to fix it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

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

Under this Labour Government the number of people on benefits is soaring, with nearly a million young people not in education, employment or training, and over 700,000 university graduates are now out of work and on benefits. Many young people are putting in hundreds of job applications and getting hundreds of rejections. This Government are killing their jobs and their dreams by taxing job-creating businesses into oblivion. What does the Secretary of State have to say to those young people?

[Pat McFadden]

What I have to say to those young people is that the rise in graduate inactivity happened under the last Government. Economic inactivity is down by 450,000 since the last election. There is a critical problem—the hon. Lady is right—in NEET numbers, which have been rising for four years. The difference is that we are doing something about that through the youth guarantee, which has £820 million behind it, and by changing her record on apprenticeships, which saw a 40% fall in youth apprenticeship starts over 10 years.

[Helen Whately]

Young people hearing that answer will not be reassured, but that is no surprise—what else can the Secretary of State say? The Prime Minister is too busy blocking rivals for his job, while a generation of young people pay the price for his weakness, and so are taxpayers, who are footing a ballooning benefits bill. Now is not the time for another review, scheme or slogan; what young people want is the chance to get a decent job and to get on in life. Surely he agrees that it is time to scrap the job-killing red tape in the Employment Rights Bill and cut taxes for businesses, so that they can give young people the chance to get off welfare and into work.

[Pat McFadden]

People want to stand for my party, but people want to leave the hon. Lady’s, and they are doing that day by day. We want to give hope to young people. That is why we have put the youth guarantee in place and we are changing the apprenticeship system: she could have done those two things while she was in office, while the NEET numbers were rising year on year, but she utterly failed to do so.

Oral Answers to Questions

Helen Whately Excerpts

Monday 8th December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

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

In the Budget last month, the Chancellor put up taxes in order to spend £16 billion more on welfare. The Government chose to make working people worse off in order to spend more on benefits. The sickness benefit bill is now set to skyrocket to more than £100 billion by the end of this decade. The Secretary of State likes to blame us, but his predecessor, the right hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), cancelled our reforms, and Labour Back Benchers stymied the Government’s. Working people are saying to me, “Why bother? I’d be better off on benefits.” The country cannot afford that. The Secretary of State must know this—he is no fool—so when is he going to come up with some welfare savings?

[Pat McFadden]

The Conservatives’ zeal for change is very touching; it is just a pity that they only discovered it the day they stopped having any responsibility for running the welfare system. Let me remind the hon. Lady that this is the system that they created, and these are the gateways to benefits that they created. The reform that they put forward was struck down by the courts, and the incentives in the system that she attacks are the ones that they legislated for. Now we have begun to change the system, with the first change in universal credit incentives for years, more support for the long-term sick and disabled, and a youth guarantee that offers hope where previously there was only neglect.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

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

I was sorry that the Secretary of State could not answer the question from my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Sarah Bool) earlier. Fortunately, there are people who can help. For instance, UKHospitality has told us that 100,000 people will lose their jobs because of the Budget. That is on top of the 150,000 jobs already lost since Labour came to power. At this rate, there will be queues forming outside jobcentres. Can she tell me what preparations the Government are making to cope with the influx of benefit claimants from all these job losses?

[Dame Diana Johnson]

May I just say gently to the shadow Secretary of State that she seems to be suffering from amnesia? We know that in the last four years of the previous Government, the number of NEETs increased by 50%. This is the Government who are going to do something about NEETs. We have our youth guarantee and our commitment to a subsidised job opportunity for those who have been out of work for 18 months or more. This is the Government who will tackle the NEETs problem.

[Helen Whately]

Businesses are cutting jobs at the fastest rate since the pandemic and unemployment has gone up every month under this Government, but clearly they are not ready to deal with the consequences. The number of jobcentre work coaches has actually fallen since they took over. No doubt the Minister will proudly tell us that they have just announced millions of pounds of spending on Government-created jobs for young people, but may I ask her to reflect for a moment? After hiking taxes on businesses so that they cannot afford to employ young people, the Government are spending a load of that tax on state-subsidised jobs for the same young people. Some are calling this the economics of the madhouse, but I simply call it Labour economics. Does the Minister not agree that the Government should get out of the way and reduce the burden on businesses so that they can create jobs, opportunities and economic growth?

[Dame Diana Johnson]

Of course we want employers and businesses to create jobs, but let me reiterate—as I am not sure that the shadow Secretary of State heard my earlier answer—that for the under-21s, no national insurance contributions are payable by an employer. Let me also refer her to my first answer and repeat that more than 329,000 more people are in work this year.

Pension Schemes Bill

Helen Whately Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 3rd December 2025 Commons Chamber

[Torsten Bell]

indicated assent.

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

The Minister is nodding!

[Steve Darling]

Thank you for the audio description!

There is much to be welcomed in the Bill, and the way that we rattled through it in Committee demonstrated that there is lots of good within it. However, as a constructive Opposition and a critical friend, I will spend most of my time reflecting on where there could be improvement.

We Liberal Democrats still feel that there are chances to ensure a mid-life MOT on investment opportunities, including five years before retirement. We think that that could be strengthened significantly. I come from an area of sadness in respect of my father, who saw the poverty of his father, a lorry driver, and threw significant amounts of his income into his personal pension just before the 1998 stock market crash. He saw the value of his investment halved. Nobody would expect a lorry driver to understand the full ins and outs of investing in the appropriate manner. It is important to reflect the fact that people live their lives without really understanding financial markets, and further strengthening that part of the Bill would be welcome.

--- Later in debate ---

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

As this Bill nears the end of its journey through our House, I take a moment to acknowledge some of the people who have played their part, whether that is former Pensions Ministers, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott), the former hon. Member for Hexham, my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier), who cannot be with us today, or my hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith), who also cannot be here today. My hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (James Wild) did such a brilliant job speaking earlier this afternoon. I also thank the hard-working members of the Bill Committee, including my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Leicestershire (Mr Bedford). Many civil servants will have worked on this Bill and pensions experts will have contributed, and I thank them all for their hard work and expertise. May I also finally offer congratulations to the current Pensions Minister, the lucky one who gets to be here to see this Bill off to the other place?

We on the Conservative Benches do not agree with all of the Bill, but there is a lot in it that we do welcome, particularly the parts that the Minister inherited from us, including the consolidation of fragmented pension pots, the introduction of the value for money framework and the pensions dashboard. Those will help people to manage their pension savings and get better returns. We also welcome the Government’s amendment of the Bill, reflecting our new clause, to index pre-1997 pensions, for which there was significant consensus across the House. That will provide some dignity for pensioners who have seen their pensions eroded over the years, and we hope that the Government continue to work with campaign groups to see that through. I also thank my right hon. Friends the Members for Herne Bay and Sandwich (Sir Roger Gale) and for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) for their representations on that.

The Bill also has some serious flaws. Nestled within the sensible reforms that the Government inherited is a power that no Government should wield: the power to mandate how pension funds invest. Today, the job of a pension fund manager is to make the best possible decisions for their fund members about where to invest. Their sole objective is the interests of those members. That is their legal duty, and mandation would change that, because mandation means the Government will be able to tell pension funds how to invest their assets. We should not for a minute underestimate the significance of that. Ministers have insisted it is merely a backstop and a tool they hope never to use, but a threat made just in case is still a threat, and pension trustees know it. I say to the Pensions Minister that a Minister should always consider the worst thing that someone else might do in their position—in essence, “I am not a bad man, but what might a bad man do?” He might be confident that he would not abuse the power, but what if someone else had it?

Those in the pensions sector do not support this plan. Earlier in the year the Minister told them to “chillax”. He may be intensely relaxed, but I must say to him that he is also intensely wrong. Trustees are the custodians of people’s life savings. They are not there to carry out manifesto pledges or pet projects, and the Minister should not put himself or any future pensions Minister in a position to tell them to do so.

Instead of forcing pension funds to invest in the UK, Ministers should ask why they have not been investing and then do something about that. Our amendment 15 gave them the opportunity to diagnose these problems and resolve them, but, as we have just seen, they voted it down. In any event, they should stop making Britain a worse place in which to do business, ramping up taxes on employment, slapping on red tape, and briefing out bad Budget news for months in advance to kill confidence in every sector of the economy.

As my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (James Wild) said earlier, our other concern with the Bill is the relationship between scale and innovation. We agree with the need for scale, but the Government should avoid blocking the emergence of new entrants and the scaling up of existing smaller players.

Finally, there is the question of pension adequacy. While the Bill should help people to manage their pension savings and boost their returns, it falls short when it comes to tackling the serious problem of people under-saving for later life. Millions of people simply are not saving enough for old age. The Government should be acting now in this regard, rather than delaying the next phase of the pensions review and attacking pension savings at every turn. First they came for pensioners’ winter fuel payments, then they came for self-invested personal pensions, and last week they came for salary sacrifice—and that was not a small tweak. The cap on salary sacrifice will net the Treasury nearly £5 billion of extra tax revenue in 2029-30—money that would otherwise have gone into people’s pensions.

We have made our points, argued our position and put amendments to a vote, so we will not be voting against the Bill on Third Reading. However, I urge the Government to listen to the wise and the many expert words that will be spoken when it is debated in the other place, and to use that opportunity to fix it.

Budget Resolutions

Helen Whately Excerpts

Thursday 27th November 2025 Commons Chamber

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

To govern is to choose, and the Chancellor has chosen. She has chosen spending over saving, higher taxes over welfare reform, and benefits Britain over working Britain. She would rather raise taxes by £26 billion than shave a single penny off the welfare bill. She will make people who work and save pay more for the benefits of millions who do not.

I say that the Chancellor chose, but are these her choices or those of Labour Back Benchers? Just a few months ago, when debating the Government’s personal independence payment reform Bill, those Back Benchers were the ones who stood up and said things like, “I didn’t come here to cut benefits.” They were the ones in and out of meetings with No. 10 while the debate was going on in this Chamber, and they were the ones who forced the Disability Minister to stand up during that debate and announce that there would, in fact, be no savings. The Government’s welfare Bill then became a spending Bill, which Labour Back Benchers all voted for, of course.

The Chancellor could have used the Budget to right that wrong—or could she? The wolves have been circling ever since. This was not a Budget for Britain; it was a Budget for Labour Back Benchers. It was a “save our skin” Budget, but in saving her own skin, the Chancellor is selling the country down the river at a cost of £26 billion to taxpayers and 200,000 jobs, on top of the 150,000 that have already been lost since Labour has been in power and the thousands more that the unemployment rights Bill will destroy.

[Yuan Yang]

Three quarters of the tax raised by this Budget will go towards building fiscal headroom, doubling it—something that previous Conservative Chancellors never did. Does the hon. Lady welcome the investment in the gilt markets that international investors have now shown, demonstrating their confidence in the UK economy?

[Helen Whately]

This Budget is simple: taxes are going up on working people to pay for more benefits. That is the story of this Budget.

The Chancellor told the country that she was spending to bring down the cost of living. Really? For whom? Inflation is up, tax is up and wage growth is down. The only group of people who are going to be better off are those on benefits—the 10 million people of working age whose benefits will be uplifted by inflation, the thousands more who will go on to sickness benefits in the year ahead, and the half a million households who will get money from the lifting of the two-child cap. Those households will receive £5,000 more on average by the end of this decade, at a cost of £3 billion to the taxpayer, and some will get much more. A family with five children could get an extra £10,500, while a family with eight children will be able to get an extra £21,000, nearly as much as the annual pay before tax of a full-time worker on the minimum wage.

Labour Members have told us again and again today how Labour is fixing child poverty by giving out that extra money. We all care about children—we all want children to get the best start in life. [Interruption.] Come on. Labour Members are chuntering at me, but they cannot doubt the fact that everyone in this place wants children to get the best start in life. Handing out money might improve the poverty statistics that they like so much to crow about, but it will not solve the problem. Work is the best way out of poverty, and the Government’s handout will make parents less likely to work.

There are couples across the country—couples in work—who are wondering whether they can afford another child. Thanks to this Budget, their taxes are going up, and their incomes may well go down. Thanks to this Budget, some of them will decide to have no more children, or no children at all. That is sad, and it is unfair. Labour Members have been crowing about the Budget, but as my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Dame Harriett Baldwin) said earlier, the threshold rises it contains could even drag some working families below the relative poverty line that they like to talk about so much.

[Paul Waugh]

The hon. Lady refers to the threshold freeze. Why did she vote for seven years of frozen thresholds?

[Helen Whately]

The sad fact is that the country went through a pandemic and we had to get the country’s finances under control. This Chancellor promised that she would not increase taxes on working people, but that is exactly what she has done. Who can trust her? I know that people out there do not.

If all we heard about this Budget was the speeches of Government Members, we would think something wonderful was going on. I hate to shatter their delusions, but the fact is that people out there are despairing. People have been saying to me, “If all the Government are going to do is take your money in taxes, why work? Why bother?” We are seeing those who can, from successful business people to talented future entrepreneurs, leaving the country. The Government are killing aspiration and growth, and, in fact, savings. The OBR says that household savings will fall as a result of the Budget, from 6% to 2% by 2030. The Budget is an attack on people who are simply doing the right thing: working, saving, trying to pay their way in life and trying to build a better future.

The Government could make different choices. If they were willing to get a grip of the welfare bill and bring it down, they could cut taxes on working people. We have heard from several Ministers, and from the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions himself, that the system needs reform, but their actions say otherwise. Working-age welfare spending is up £40 billion in this Budget. The Timms review’s terms of reference tell us that there are no savings to see here. The Secretary of State will not even say the word “savings”. They say one thing, but do another. It sums them up. After all those promises not to put taxes up on working people, here we are with two Budgets in a row hiking taxes on working people.

It does not have to be this way. We have identified £47 billion of savings from public spending. Of that, £23 billion is welfare savings from doing the right thing, such as stopping giving sickness benefits to people with anxiety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and stopping handing out benefits to foreign nationals. It is not kind or compassionate to trap people on benefits. It is not fair on people who are working to pay the bills, and it is simply not affordable for our country to go on like this.

The Minister likes to chat a lot during debates, and he has said that he stood for office “to stop drawing charts”—[Interruption.] He might like to listen to what he actually said, although he does not like to listen to other people. He said that he stood for office

“to stop drawing charts and start changing them.”

He has certainly achieved that. Inflation is up, unemployment is up, borrowing is up and public spending is up. Perhaps he can tell us which of those he is most proud of.

The Minister, the Chancellor, the Prime Minister and the entire Government will all leave their mark on our country with this Budget. At their last Budget, they dug a hole. With this Budget, they have dug it deeper. Instead of cutting the welfare bill, they are adding to it. Instead of getting people into work, they are putting them on benefits. Instead of backing workers, they are funding stay-at-homers using the hard-earned money of Britain’s taxpayers. That is the choice they have made, and we reject it.

Welfare Spending

Helen Whately Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2025 Commons Chamber

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

I beg to move,

That this House regrets the failure of the Government to get people off welfare and into work; believes that reforming the welfare system is a moral mission; and therefore calls on the Government to take urgent action to fix Britain’s welfare system by restricting welfare for non-UK citizens, stopping benefits for those with lower-level mental health conditions, increasing the number of face-to-face assessments, reforming the Motability Scheme so that only those with serious disabilities qualify for a vehicle, and retaining the two-child benefit cap, to get people into employment and build a stronger economy.

All of us surely remember our first job and the moment we got our first paycheque. I was 16, I got paid £40 and I bought myself a pair of shoes. They were nothing fancy, but I remember that feeling. It was the first time I had money in my pocket that I had earned to spend how I pleased. It was a moment of liberation from which there was no going back. Of course, as we get older, it is not so simple. We have more obligations and bills to pay, but the basic fact is the same. Having a job and paying our own way is how we get independence, freedom and agency. We can make our own choices and have a chance to build up our financial security. Not every job takes us on a path paved with gold, but if we are not in work, we do not even have a chance of changing our fortune.

Millions of people up and down the country know what I am talking about. They are the people who get up each morning and go to work, or the people who go to work every evening if they are doing a night shift, while some people are doing both to make ends meet. However, it is not everyone: in fact, it is not a lot of people. Let us look at the numbers. There are 6.5 million people of working age on out-of-work benefits, nearly 1 million young people are not in any form of employment, education or training, and every single day 5,000 people are signing on to long-term sickness benefits with no requirement to work. Those numbers should worry all of us in this place. They are not just statistics; we are talking about people—mums, dads, women in their 50s, young men in their 20s—who are missing out, sat at home rather than at work, and waiting for the handout to drop into their bank account rather than out there putting their shoulder to the wheel.

For every person on benefits and out of work, there are many more who suffer the consequences of worklessness, such as the increasing number of children who are growing up in workless households. More than 1 million children across our country have neither the income nor the culture of work, so worklessness gets passed from one generation to the next, stunting life chances—opportunities, prosperity and longevity—in every sense of the word.

This applies to entire communities: there are large parts of our country where being on benefits is not a rarity, it has become the norm. From our great cities such as Birmingham and Liverpool to historic seaside towns such as Blackpool, around a quarter of the population are in out-of-work benefits. Drop into some of the poorest areas of those cities and you will find communities where the majority of people are on benefits. Think what that means in practice along a street, door after door. And watch out if you are the odd one out actually trying to go to work, as I heard on one of my visits recently. A whole family were yelling at their son, who was trying to break the cycle of worklessness, because his 7 am alarm clock was disturbing their sleep.

As shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, I travel the country talking to people and finding out the facts on the ground. One story that stuck with me is about a young man in his 20s from Bridgend in Wales. He is on benefits, but he got a place on a course at the local college—the exact course he wanted to do. It had the potential to give him skills and transform his life. It could have got him off benefits and into work at the job he really wanted to do, but it did not happen. Why? Because he was terrified of being worse off—that he would lose his personal independence payment and end up broke. That is wrong. And let us be frank: his story is not a one-off. It is going on all around the country. Everywhere, every day, people are deciding they are better off on benefits.

Our welfare system should be a safety net but it has become a welfare trap, condemning people to live off the state rather than off their elbow grease. Of course, help should be there for people who are unable to work or who need a lot of support to do so. In fact, if the system worked better, it might be able to help some people—those who really need it—more. Instead, we have many thousands of people making rational decisions to claim benefits rather than work, the benefits bill rocketing, and still people who are disabled facing a struggle to get help and make ends meet.

[Sarah Smith (Hyndburn) (Lab)]

Does the hon. Lady not recognise that personal independence payment is not a benefit paid on your ability to work—it is paid regardless—so providing that case study is perhaps not the most appropriate to making the argument she is trying progress?

[Helen Whately]

Of course I know that, but if the hon. Lady had talked to as many people who receive PIP as I have, she would know that many people worry that if they go into training or work, they will then, when they are reassessed, lose their PIP. Even though in theory, yes, you can work if you can while you are getting PIP, people worry that because they are working it will be then be seen as them not actually needing it and that they do not actually have that level of health problem. That is why at the moment it is acting, in the way in works, as a barrier and a disincentive to work, and that is why it needs reform.

Reforming welfare is not cruel to people on benefits—quite the opposite. What is cruel is ducking the challenge, accepting the status quo and continuing to spend millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on keeping people on benefits, but that is exactly what the Labour party is doing. Just a few months ago, the Prime Minister and the former Work and Pensions Secretary did have a go at doing something about it. They set out some welfare cuts—rushed and poorly thought-through, as I said at the time—but their Back Benchers were having none of it. We have never seen anything like it. It was the very definition of shambles in this Chamber. Right in the middle of the debate, their savings Bill became a spending Bill, with the Government frantically making concessions that we still live with, such as the Timms review into PIP.

I have a great deal of respect for the Minister for Social Security and Disability, the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms), but what hope can we have for his review when it was conceived as a bargaining chip to buy off angry Back Benchers? It has taken months to even kick off the review and months to come up with the terms of reference. Now we have them, we see that welfare savings are off the table. And yes, I said “savings”, a word the Secretary of State was careful to steer clear of in questions last week. What a situation this is.

The Chancellor keeps talking about welfare savings; she did so again this morning. However, the review by the Minister for Social Security and Disability ruled out making any savings. The Secretary of State will not even utter the word. Who will win this argument? Will it be the hapless Chancellor with her back against the wall or the wily Welfare Secretary playing a longer game?

While Ministers spar behind the political scenes, the clock is ticking and the benefits bill keeps heading up and up towards £100 billion, with no prospect of the Government slowing that trajectory, let alone actually getting it down. Instead, as the Chancellor as good as told us this morning, the Government will turn to tax rises to fund welfare and more job-destroying, growth-killing policies, reducing opportunities and saddling future generations with the bill, leaving them to pay it off for decades to come. The Government have not only given up on saving money; they have given up on millions of people across Britain.

[Oliver Ryan (Burnley) (Lab/Co-op)]

On savings and leaving the next generation with a bill, can the hon. Lady remind the House just how much the now shadow Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Central Devon (Sir Mel Stride), increased Department for Work and Pensions spending on welfare during his time in the Department? The figure I have on the tip of my tongue is somewhere north of £30 billion. Could she comment on that?

[Helen Whately]

The hon. Gentleman thinks he is so clever, but I am sorry to say this is a whole lot more serious than that. [Interruption.] I am glad Labour Members liked that. The fact is, if the hon. Gentleman looked a little further than his time in politics, back to 2010, he would know that the welfare bill and unemployment figures came down, and that we had the huge reform of universal credit, led by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith), which made a huge difference. [Interruption.] As has been chuntered by those on the Government Front Bench, yes, of course, the pandemic made a difference. We had a set of reforms going on, and then those on the Front Bench and some of their predecessors—there has been a certain amount of turnover—came in and gave up on those reforms. Where are we now? There are no savings and no plans to get people off welfare and into work.

However, it does not have to be this way. The country knows that this is not working, and people want change. They want a fairer system: one where people who do the right thing are rewarded; where work does pay; where people taking personal responsibility for themselves and their family makes sense; where there is help for those who need it, but not for just anyone who might fancy it; and where welfare is a safety net, not a way of life. It might be hard for Members on the Government Benches to hear, but this is what people out there want. They want it now—let us get on with it.

The Conservatives have set out our common-sense proposals to start fixing the welfare system. We would stop sickness benefits for people with lower-level mental health conditions like anxiety and reform Motability, putting an end to taxpayer-funded cars for people who have conditions like ADHD and tennis elbow. We would bring back face-to-face assessments, which are going down under this Labour Government, and change the sick note system so that it does not just funnel people out of the office and on to benefits. We would prioritise Brits in our welfare system, stopping people with indefinite and limited leave to remain claiming benefits. Of course, we also believe in retaining the two-child benefit cap, because it is fiscally responsible and fair. Removing the cap would cost more than £3 billion and would be deeply unfair on families who are not on benefits—the couples who decide they cannot afford another child, but would pay taxes for someone else to do just that. The Conservatives are the only party fully committed to the two-child benefit cap—no ifs, no buts.

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

I have read somewhere that the list of things the hon. Lady has gone through would, the Conservatives estimate, save £23 billion. Part of that is from housing benefit. Can she tell us how much of the £23 billion would be saved from housing benefit?

[Helen Whately]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that question. As he says, we have earmarked potential savings of £23 billion, and housing benefit is one area. There is the other set of savings that I have just gone through. I am very happy to go through some of our sums and how we have got to those figures with him. As I have said to him, I believe that this Government should be picking up on our suggestions, because that is how they could bring down the welfare bill and avoid what we saw the Chancellor clearly rolling the pitch for this morning: tax rises at the Budget.

Times are hard. I do not want the Government to put up taxes. I do not want them to keep spending other people’s money on welfare, because we all know that one day it will run out. I do not want them to keep people living a life on benefits rather than being in work. That is why I have been so clear about what they could and should do.

I have heard Labour Back Benchers say in this Chamber, “I didn’t come here to cut benefits”, and that is why we have offered to help. The Leader of the Opposition, the shadow Chancellor and I have made a big offer to the Government. We will help them make welfare savings, and we will work with them in good faith to get the welfare bill down and get people off welfare and into work. Labour Back Benchers do not want to make the tough decisions on welfare, but our door is open. We will work with the Government in the national interest. It is not too late to make those bold decisions and make serious savings. A vote for our motion is a vote to get Britain’s welfare system back on track, to get the welfare bill under control, and to set out on a moral mission to get millions off welfare and into work.

Oral Answers to Questions

Helen Whately Excerpts

Monday 27th October 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

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

I welcome the Secretary of State to his new job and wish him luck in it—especially because, with every day that passes under this Government, we see fewer people enjoying the chance to start a new job. Unemployment has gone up month after month. Nearly 1 million young people are not in education, employment or training because of this Government’s policies, jobs tax and business red tape; even the Pensions Minister’s former think-tank agrees with me. People all around the country are out looking for work—young people who want to get on in life and all those trying to provide for their families—so can the Secretary of State tell us and them when he will get unemployment down?

[Pat McFadden]

The hon. Lady has a short memory. The Government in which she served presided over the biggest slowdown in living standards in recent memory, and there are 358,000 more people in work now than there were at the start of the year. We will keep supporting young people into work and will change the system that we inherited, which had the wrong incentives and a lack of support. We are putting both of those things to rights.

[Helen Whately]

No surprises there, Mr Speaker; the Prime Minister can put new faces on the Front Bench, but they still do not have the answers. The right hon. Gentleman criticised the previous Conservative Government, but we got unemployment down to a 40-year low—a record Labour could only dream of. The Government do not want to be held to account. Worse still, the right hon. Gentleman knows that what he is doing will not work, because the country is looking down the barrel of more tax rises in next month’s Budget, which will kill yet more jobs and opportunities. Whether it is graduates looking for their first job or older people being made redundant, people are crying out for a Government who are on their side. What will it take to get the Chancellor to understand that it is businesses that create jobs, not the Government, and does the right hon. Gentleman not agree that the more the Chancellor damages the economy, the bigger the welfare bill will get?

[Pat McFadden]

Since we came into office, interest rates have been cut five times, helping businesses and households. According to Lloyds, business confidence is at a nine-year high, and there is to be much more private investment, including the £150 billion announced during the recent state visit. Add to that the trade deals that the Conservatives could not secure—there are reasons to be optimistic about the future of the economy and I hope the hon. Lady shares them.

--- Later in debate ---

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

Indeed, questions are to be answered by the Government on this occasion.

The right hon. Gentleman has an important and not always easy job. I am sure that we all remember the fiasco before the summer when the Government tried to make welfare savings and ended up legislating for welfare spending. Since then, the Prime Minister has said that there is a “clear moral case” for welfare cuts, and the Chancellor has said that she “can’t leave welfare untouched”. Does the Secretary of State agree?

[Pat McFadden]

I notice that the hon. Lady did not want to clarify the position on means-testing the state pension. Welfare reform is happening all the time. We passed important changes to the universal credit system that were voted through by the House and, as I said, we are putting in place important employment support to help not only long-term sick and disabled people but young people into work through many of the policies that I have talked about today.

[Helen Whately]

I cannot help but notice that the Secretary of State continues to attempt to deflect from his job of answering the questions. The fact is, we just heard that he will not commit to making the welfare savings that his Prime Minister and his Chancellor have said they need to make. I thought the Prime Minister was meant to be in charge.

Getting people off welfare and into work not only saves money; it is morally wrong to condemn people to a life on benefits. Without welfare reform, this country is stuck on Labour’s broken record of higher taxes and lower growth. We have even offered to help the Secretary of State, so why will he not commit to making welfare savings?

[Pat McFadden]

We inherited a situation that had 3 million people inactive and almost 1 million people not in employment, education or training. We are putting in place critical employment support to help long-term sick and disabled people into work, we have changed the incentives through legislation on the universal credit system, and we are increasing the number of face-to-face checks in the system, which fell on the Conservatives’ watch. What do people think it fell by? Do we think it fell by 10%? Do we think it fell by 30%? No, it fell by 90% under the system over which the hon. Lady’s Government presided.

Oral Answers to Questions

Helen Whately Excerpts

Monday 1st September 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

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

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is good to see you back after the summer recess.

The hon. Lady can fling around the stats all she likes, but the facts are clear and bleak. Under her watch, youth unemployment has gone up; nearly a million young people, and rising, are not in work or education, including over 40,000 more young women. A generation of brilliant young people are going on to benefits, rather than into work. The Government’s jobs tax and their unemployment rights Bill were guaranteed to reduce opportunities for young people. We have had the winter fuel U-turn and the welfare U-turn; why not a U-turn to help young people?

[Alison McGovern]

The damage was done to the coming generation under the Tories. We failed the pandemic generation, who put a shift in—they stayed at home and gave up their social lives to save older loved ones. I could talk at length about our youth guarantee, our trailblazers and the work we are doing to expand youth hubs, but actually, it sticks in my craw to hear the Conservatives, who failed this generation, harp on about it from that Dispatch Box.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Speaker]

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

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

I welcome the right hon. Lady back after the summer. She said recently that it had been “a bumpy…few months”—an understatement, in my view. Last time we stood here, she had just completed a rather humiliating climbdown on her welfare savings plans. She set out to save money, but ended up spending it. You couldn’t make it up, Mr Speaker, but here we are: the number of benefit claimants has hit a record high; the sickness benefit bill is heading up and up; and still the right hon. Lady has Back Benchers and Cabinet colleagues calling for even more spending on welfare. The Chancellor is busy doing her sums in advance of the Budget, so can the right hon. Lady tell us how much lifting the two-child benefits cap will cost?

[Liz Kendall]

I am not often called understated, but I thank the hon. Lady for her comments.

Welfare reform is always difficult because it involves real people and real lives, and it is a complicated and personal issue. However, we are investing £3.8 billion in employment support to help sick and disabled people into work, we are introducing the first ever right to try work, and we are dealing fundamentally with the perverse incentive left by the Conservative party which encouraged people to define themselves as incapable of work. We are addressing that by raising the standard allowance of universal credit and halving the health top-up for new claims. There is much more that we need to do, and we will be publishing our strategy to deal with child poverty in the autumn, but I am proud to say that the last Labour Government lifted 600,000 children out of poverty, while the hon. Lady’s party plunged 900,000 children into poverty. We will take action, and, as I said earlier, the hon. Lady should watch this space.

[Helen Whately]

I asked the right hon. Lady a simple question, but I fear that she does not know the answer; she certainly did not reply to it. What is clear is that Labour wants to spend more on welfare. So do the Liberal Democrats, and so does Reform. Only one party here is telling the truth about the welfare bill: the country cannot afford it.

May I urge the right hon. Lady to take up my proposals? Will she stop giving people benefits for common mental health problems such as anxiety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and give them help instead? Will she stop giving personal independence payments to foreign citizens who have not paid into our system and free cars to people who do not need them? Will she stop people scamming the benefits system over the phone and on the internet? Will she keep the two-child benefits cap, and get the benefits bill under control?

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Can I just say that we are on topicals? It is your own Members who are not going to get in.

Welfare Spending

Helen Whately Excerpts

Tuesday 15th July 2025 Commons Chamber

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

I beg to move,

That this House believes the two-child benefit cap should remain in place and that households with a third or subsequent child born from 6 April 2017 claiming Universal Credit or Child Tax Credit should not receive additional funding, because those who receive benefits should make the same decisions about having children as those who do not; further believes that lifting the cap would exacerbate a benefits culture which is unfair on the taxpayers who pay for it and unfair on those who become trapped on benefits, because those who can work, should work; and generally supports further changes to reduce welfare spending and ensure that benefits are there only for those who need them.

All of us have to make difficult choices in life about what we can afford. Many of us here are fortunate, but one of those choices will have been the number of children we have. We may wish that such an important decision were not tainted by something as unromantic as money, but that is the hard fact of the matter. Children are wonderful—I say that as the mum of three teenagers—but bringing them up is an expensive business. As Conservatives we believe in the importance of family, in personal responsibility, in fairness, and as families and as a society, in living within our means. That is why today we are calling on all Members to affirm our commitment to a policy that reflects those principles.

Let me take a step back for a moment and reflect on the situation we are in as a country. We have 28 million people in Britain who are now working to pay the wages, benefits and pensions of 28 million others. More than half of all households received more in benefits and benefits in kind than they have paid in taxes. To spell that out, more people are net recipients than net contributors. That is happening right now, and with every day that passes, spending on benefits is going up and up. Health and disability benefits alone are set to hit £100 billion by the end of the decade. That is more than we spend on defence, on education and on policing.

While it might seem kind to spend more on welfare, it is not. It is not kind to those trapped in the welfare system and written off to a lifetime on benefits. As we embark on a doom loop of uncontrolled spending, higher taxes, struggling businesses, entrepreneurial exodus, rising unemployment and then more people out of work and on benefits, it is not kind to those who lose their jobs and their incomes in that cycle of misery. If the moment comes when we cannot afford to provide welfare even to those in desperate need, it most definitely will not be kind to them, the very people our welfare safety net is meant to be there for.

[Dave Doogan (Angus and Perthshire Glens) (SNP)]

The shadow Minister talks about kindness. Does she agree, therefore, with the Children’s Commissioner for England, who has said that children in England are now living in “Dickensian levels” of poverty? A principal element of that is the two-child cap. What element of kindness does the shadow Minister see present in that unfairness?

[Helen Whately]

I do not agree with the hon. Member. I am going to talk about poverty in a moment, so if he will just hold on, he will hear my view on that point.

This is a ticking time bomb. If we do not solve this problem, our economy will collapse, yet opposite me sit members of this Labour Government who have just shown us, with the welfare chaos over the past couple of weeks, that they will not, and indeed cannot, fix this. In fact, they are just making it worse.

If hon. Members cast their minds back to early 2020, they will remember that Labour was in the midst of a leadership election. The now Prime Minister made a clear and unequivocal commitment to

“scrap…punitive sanctions, two-child limit and benefits cap.”

Then, once he had secured the leadership of the Labour party and the election neared, he changed that tune. He said Labour was not going to abolish the two-child limit. He acknowledged the need to take tough decisions and not to make unfunded spending promises, and on this we can agree. But saying that he would take tough decisions is not the same as actually taking them.

Take for example the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill, now just called the Universal Credit Bill, which Labour voted through last week. It was meant to save £5 billion. The first U-turn brought that down to £2 billion, and the next U-turn then brought it down to—well, the Minister on the Front Bench at the time could not tell us, but the consensus is that it will now cost the taxpayer around £100 million.

[Dame Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Does she agree that, as a result of that Bill, one of the things that is most shocking is that in due course it will actually pay someone more to be on welfare than to work full time on the minimum wage?

[Helen Whately]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about the problem of a welfare trap, where people would better be better off on benefits than working full time on the minimum wage.

[Deirdre Costigan (Ealing Southall) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Helen Whately]

I will first make a little progress, but then I will be happy to give way to the hon. Lady.

Last week’s welfare fiasco saw a Bill that was meant to save money become a Bill that will cost money. We have also seen the fiasco of the winter fuel payments cut, with the Government having to row back on their tough talk because taking money from low-income pensioners is not, in fact, the way to make savings. And now we are debating the future of the two-child limit, which Cabinet Ministers, including the Prime Minister, have indicated is the next tough choice that they are not going to make.

[Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)]

My hon. Friend talks about tough choices. Does she agree that families that are in work make tough choices every single day, about what they can afford and how they spend their money, and that those who receive benefits should really have to make the same tough choices?

[Helen Whately]

My hon. Friend makes an important and thoughtful point. Many families, whether they are living off benefits or in work, would like to have more children but have to make these difficult choices about what they can afford. This is a point about fairness.

I know that many Labour Members passionately believe that the limit should go, and they will make arguments today about child poverty as if they were the only ones who care about it—[Interruption.] For the avoidance of doubt, that is not true. Our difference of opinion is about what to do about it. I think all of us are at a loss to know what the Prime Minister believes in. By contrast, we know what we believe in and we know why we are here. That is why we have brought forward this debate on the two-child limit, because somebody has to make the case for fiscal responsibility, for living within our means, for fairness, for ensuring that work pays and for keeping the two-child cap.

I want to be clear that all of us—including those of us on the Opposition Benches—want children to have the best possible start in life. Let us also be clear about what the two-child limit actually is, because I note that some Members from other parties are confused. The two-child limit restricts the amount of additional universal credit that families receive for having children to the first two children only, with some sensible exceptions, such as for twins or non-consensual conception. The cap does not apply to child benefit, which is available to all families with incomes of up to £80,000 for every child, regardless of the number of children in a family.

[Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)]

I am proud to be a member of the party of Wilberforce, Shaftesbury and Disraeli, who all understood that it is essential to free people from need, and that in that effort the state can be a force for good. But in freeing people from need we should not limit them to a life of dependency. It is entirely possible to believe that although welfare can be a force for good, so too can personal responsibility, and responsibility means making the kinds of choices that my hon. Friend has set out.

[Helen Whately]

I could not put it better than my right hon. Friend.

We know that bringing up children is expensive and important. When working couples have to make tough decisions about whether they can afford to start a family in the first place, they should not be made to pay more in taxes to fund their neighbour to have a third, fourth or fifth child. Someone in a job does not get paid more just because they have another child. If we are worried about people getting caught in a benefits trap where it pays more to be on welfare than in work, how much worse would it be with neither the two-child benefit nor the benefits cap? It would mean benefits increased by thousands. When I say thousands, the House of Commons Library has told me that a family with five children would get more than £10,000 extra a year and a family with eight children would get more than £20,000 extra a year. That is more than the after-tax income of someone working full time on the minimum wage.

[Deirdre Costigan]

Does the hon. Member seriously believe that any family anywhere in the country will take seriously the Conservative party lecturing them on personal and fiscal responsibility, when this is the party that not only brought the economy to its knees through the uncosted promises of Liz Truss’s Government, but partied in the back garden of No. 10 when the rest of us were under covid restrictions?

[Helen Whately]

If I could take the hon. Lady back a bit, she might remember when we came into office in 2010, and we had to bring down the deficit year after year to get the country’s finances under control.

Giving children the best start in life is not as simple as handing out more money. It is about giving parents the community support they need as they encounter the challenges of bringing up a child, which is why we launched the family hubs. It is about education, but school teachers around the country are being let go. It is about growing up in a household with someone in work, but across the country people are being made redundant because of the Chancellor’s jobs tax.

I know that I will not win over everyone here with my argument. For instance, I do not expect to convince the four remaining Reform MPs, because their leader has said that he would remove the two-child limit—the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) believes that is the right thing to do and said that he is not finished yet on benefit giveaways. But asking the taxpayer for ever more in taxes to pay for their neighbour’s benefits is not the right thing to do. The country, taxpayers and future generations cannot afford this. The Prime Minister, the Chancellor and Cabinet Ministers have been unable to rule out more tax rises this autumn. Businesses, working people, pensioners, savers, homeowners—whose pocket will be picked next?

Last week, the Office for Budget Responsibility warned that the UK’s finances are in a very “vulnerable position”. Now more than ever we need the Government to take the tough decisions—but will they? I know Labour Back Benchers are itching to vote to scrap the limit, but where are the Government on this? Will they take the position of the Prime Minister in 2020, in 2024 or now, or will they have to abstain because the Government just do not know? Soon we will see.

Only the Conservatives understand the importance of personal responsibility, fairness and living within our means. Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP, the Greens and Reform all voted last week for more welfare spending. Will they do the same today, or will they vote with us to back the people getting up every morning, going out to work, doing the hard yards, making the hard choices and working hard to build our country?