Department for Work and Pensions

John Milne Excerpts

Tuesday 30th June 2026 Commons Chamber

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

Right now, it is hard to get through a day without someone, somewhere, saying that welfare spending is ballooning out of control. For example, the Conservatives’ alternative King’s Speech tells us:

“For the first time ever, the total welfare bill is now higher than total receipts from income tax.”

Western civilisation is at an end, it seems—until we realise that it is not the first time at all. It has been that way for 13 years, most of them under the Conservatives. Then we discover that the ratio is about to go into reverse: for the next few years, welfare is forecast to be lower than income tax receipts—panic over, then. Remarkably, as a percentage of GDP, the amount we spend on welfare today is roughly the same as it was under Maggie Thatcher 40 years ago. Today’s welfare bill is simply not the cause of our economic problems, and neither can it be the sole solution.

Although moral panic is an overreaction, we should not relax. Cost control is always crucial, so long as we understand that today’s budget pressure is less to do with welfare and more to do with NHS demand and a general weakness in the economy. “New benefit claimants are suffering from mild anxiety,” we are told, “The need isn’t real. Why don’t they just man up?” The neat thing about this angle is that we can be mean to people in need but still feel good about ourselves. But this is a misreading of the data. Most claimants have more than one condition. If a claimant who cannot walk also has mild anxiety, they are counted only in the mild anxiety column. It is a false characterisation of a scrounger culture, and that itself is part of the reason we never fix things. Most attempts to cut the benefits bill fail. They hardly ever save as much money as they were supposed to and they can even end up costing more than they save.

I fully recognise the need to control costs and that a healthy economy is the root of a healthy benefit system, but basing national policy around the minority of claimants who do not want to help themselves is the surest way never to fix our benefit system.