Welfare Spending

Johanna Baxter Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

It is interesting to hear what is being put forward, considering that this lot on the Conservative Benches created the welfare system that we currently have, and that lot on the Labour Benches are keeping it going. The reality is that the mini-Budget that massively changed house prices and meant mortgage interest rates went through the roof has contributed to the cost of living crisis. The reality is that Brexit has meant that we are all worse off. The reality is that, with a UK Labour Government now, the economy is not growing: there is no creation of jobs and, for example, we still have a massive issue with productivity. We still have an incredibly broken system, and the problem is Westminster—it is all of you; every one of you on both sides has contributed to the current system.

People are not standing up today to talk about the fact that we have child poverty, and to say that what the welfare system should be doing is improving that system so we do not have so much child poverty. Child poverty is reducing in Scotland. However, the child poverty strategy was pushed back from the spring to the autumn, and now the Minister for Social Security and Disability is saying that it will be the end of the year. When he stood up, he said he was going to seek the support of the House for the Government’s mission, but he is not actually going to do so. What he is going to do tonight is vote against the Tory motion. The Government have not put forward an amendment laying out their plans for what they intend to do.

The Tory motion is a complete and total mess. The Tories seem to be trying to assign value to humans. They seem to be saying, “As long as you’re earning a significant amount of money, you were born in the UK and you’re a British citizen, you’re okay. If you are not—if you don’t fit in those boxes—you are somehow less valuable.”

Both sides have been making the argument that people are either getting universal credit and other benefits or they are in work, but those two things are not mutually exclusive. For a significant number of people, work does not pay. The income of a significant number of people has to be supported by the welfare system, because the economy that both sides have created means they are not getting enough money to be able to pay for the basic things they need. The price of butter, olive oil, potatoes and rice has gone through the roof, and people cannot afford their energy bills because of rampant inflation, which continues, and the cost of living crisis continues to bite because wages have not kept pace with those prices.

The current welfare system is not reducing poverty, but it also has to support people currently in work because they are not getting enough money. If the Conservatives are assigning value to humans—saying that people who are not UK citizens do not necessarily deserve benefits—they are going to be having very interesting conversations with expats in Spain and Canada, with which we have reciprocal social security arrangements. They will be immensely furious that they will no longer be eligible for any of the support they receive from those Governments, and I think it is bizarre for the Conservatives to support such a position, given how many of those expats are Conservative voters who are going to be monumentally stuffed as a result of the Tory position.

I think it is absolutely ridiculous that we are here listening to the Conservatives, who created this system, arguing about how terrible it is. What we should be doing—

[Johanna Baxter (Paisley and Renfrewshire South) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Kirsty Blackman]

No, thank you.

What we should be doing in the Budget and in the child poverty strategy is talking about how the welfare system should support people and about how the welfare system fails to support people. I wish the Minister for Social Security and Disability well in his work co-producing his report, but the welfare system is currently broken, and that is not because the costs are spiralling out of control. The welfare system is currently broken because people are being demonised simply for claiming enough to live on.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (Andrew Western)]

The reason why we are having this debate is straightforward: the welfare system is broken. We have begun the job of fixing it, but the fact is that the system was broken by the Conservatives. They oversaw 14 years of failure on welfare until they were kicked out last year.

[Johanna Baxter]

Does my hon. Friend agree that we should take no lectures from the people who broke the system in the first place? In Scotland, one in six young people are not in education, employment or training; 12,000 Scots have been stuck on NHS waiting lists for over two years, and 8,300 people are economically inactive in Renfrewshire alone due to ill health. Far from lecturing us, should Conservative Members not look at themselves first?

[Andrew Western]

I agree absolutely with my hon. Friend. [Laughter.] I see Members are surprised to learn that. She passionately makes the case that neither the SNP nor the Conservatives should be listened to on this issue. If I were in the Conservatives’ position, I might want to shy away from the subject, given their unenviable record. Their Government left us with a social security system that traps on benefits hundreds of thousands who could work and want to work. Fraud against the public sector was at eye-watering levels; some of the Department for Work and Pension’s powers to tackle fraud were over 20 years out of date; and a generation of young people have been neglected—there was a shameful rise in child poverty, and nearly a million young people were left out of work, education or training.

The Conservatives ignored every warning light on the dashboard while they drove down opportunity and drove up inactivity. They delivered the worst of all worlds, and now they have the cheek to come to this place and preach fiscal rectitude. We are cleaning up the mess that they left behind.

Let me turn to comments made in the debate, beginning with those by the shadow Secretary of State, the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately). She talked of generations of families experiencing persistent worklessness, but this is a system that the Conservatives built. She gave an example of a young man in Bridgend who she says “fears” that he would be worse off in work, but who created that system? Where has that disincentive come from? The Conservatives entrenched that fear.

I fundamentally disagree with the shadow Secretary of State’s analysis, because the personal independence payment is an enabler of work for many people. It is there to meet the additional costs of disability and help disabled people with day-to-day living costs, and it helps many of them get to and from the workplace. She talked about the trajectory of welfare spend, but who set us on that trajectory? We heard that covid was to blame, yet 2022, 2023 and the first half of 2024 were not the ideal time to begin addressing the issue. Funnily enough, that ideal time was from July 2024. The Conservatives are running from their record, and they are right to do so.

We heard that the number of face-to-face assessments is too low. I absolutely agree that the number of face-to-face assessments needs to increase, but the shadow Secretary of State would do well to remember that the contracts we are signed up to were signed by the Conservatives, and they commit the contractors to 20% of assessments being face-to-face. This is the problem.

We also heard from the Liberal Democrat spokesperson, the hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling), who is not in his place. He was right to highlight the shocking way that economic inactivity spiralled between 2019 and 2024, and to reference the state of the national health service. However, I will briefly correct his suggestion that NHS spending is being cut under the Government. We are increasing day-to-day NHS spending in real terms by £18.5 billion by 2028-29.

The hon. Member for Mid Leicestershire (Mr Bedford), whom I like very much, congratulated the shadow Secretary of State on her £23 billion package of savings. I hope he shares my concern about the fact that the shadow Secretary of State was unable to say how much of that was coming from proposed changes to housing benefit. I hope that he noted the same irony that I did: earlier, the shadow Secretary of State responded to an intervention from my hon. Friend the Member for Burnley (Oliver Ryan) by telling him that he thought he was so clever for knowing his statistics. If only she could say the same of herself.

We then heard from the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Sarah Bool), who espoused the virtues of living within our means. That would have had significantly more clout had the Conservative party done the same in the welfare space in recent years.

The hon. Member for Bridgwater (Sir Ashley Fox) said that Britain under Labour had stopped working. I remind him that over 700,000 more people are in work now than were before the election, and economic inactivity is down by 363,000.