Welfare

Mark Pritchard Excerpts

Wednesday 11th November 2026 Commons Chamber

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

I beg to move,

That this House calls on the Government to commit to bringing working-age welfare spending down in this Parliament.

The day after the Budget, we heard the Chancellor on the radio telling the country some good news: the welfare bill would come down in this Parliament. But hold your horses, Treasury spinners hit the phones just minutes later to say that they could not commit to that. Even No. 10 intervened to say that it has never set an arbitrary target or timetable. By 5 pm, the Chancellor had done a remarkably rapid reverse ferret. He popped up on Channel 4 to tell us that the Government will not bring down welfare this Parliament after all. What a mess. It was, “Oh yes, we will,” then, “Oh no, we won’t.” It is a bit early for pantomime season. Seriously, what is going on over on the Government Benches?

The bill for working-age welfare is £183 billion a year, and it is set to rise to more than £200 billion. Taxes are up, borrowing is up, the cost of borrowing is up, and the Government cannot tell us how they will fund 3% of GDP on defence, on today of all days. They said that they would not put up taxes on working people, but paying for all that welfare will cost working households £50,000 in taxes over this Parliament. The country cannot afford this Labour Government, but it is what we have come to expect from them—no plan, no conviction and no backbone, just ducking tough choices and leaving working families to pay the price.

[Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)]

My hon. Friend mentions that the Government have no plan, and that includes not having a plan to fund defence. Does she agree that there is no social security without national security, and that threats to the UK are real, present, multiple and serious? Putting off increasing defence spending until later on in the autumn or perhaps even later is a dereliction of duty. The first duty of any Government is to protect our constituents and this nation, and putting off defence spending increases is putting our nation at risk.

[Helen Whately]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. The first duty of Government is national security. We will not even have social security if we do not have national security. We have to find a way to fund defence. There is no time to waste. As I will set out in my speech, there are plenty of opportunities to make substantial welfare savings, to cut taxes, to bring down the deficit and to fund defence.

To be fair, some Government Members understand the situation that the country is in. Some of them know that their constituents understand it, too. That is why they sometimes go through the motions, as with their amendment today, albeit they hid it at the very end, with some wording that they want to “bring down the benefits bill”. I wonder whether Labour Whips were hoping that their leftie Back Benchers would not read that far. Though Labour talks about bringing down the bill, there is no date. It is the same thing when the Prime Minister says that he wants to bring welfare spending down

“as soon as we possibly can.”

It is nonsense. Without a date or plan, it is just empty words. No one trusts this Government on welfare. Apparently there will not even be any savings in the Prime Minister’s 10-year plan.

[Helen Whately]

I will set out how we will achieve our £36 billion in savings, if the hon. Gentleman will just sit back and listen. All we have heard from him and his party are plans to spend more money, and he simply reiterated that just now. We do not bring the benefits bill down by spending more money.

This is not just about the welfare bill. Let us talk about what is happening to our country. A total of 6.7 million people of working age are not working and are on out-of-work benefits, and 700,000 of them are under the age of 25. This is a disaster. All those young people are sitting at home whiling away the day instead of going out to work and getting on with their lives. One in four adults now identify as disabled. Claims for personal independence payment have doubled since 2019, but the country is not twice as sick. Hundreds of thousands of households claimed more than £32,000 in benefits last year, and some of them claimed more than £60,000. That is almost twice the average take-home pay of a British worker. People who are working are asking, “Why do I bother?” We cannot expect taxpayers to keep funding a welfare system that is clearly so broken and so unfair.

[Mark Pritchard]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her generosity in giving way. I am sure she would like to see the details at some point, but is she aware that some people are actually getting mortgages to buy houses on the basis of the benefits they receive, and that those on benefits who can save a little are actually using benefits to save for a deposit? I am in favour of cutting benefits as long as we protect the most vulnerable, but it is fundamentally unfair that people in my constituency who are working in factories, on farms and in offices and are struggling to save for their first property or pay their mortgage should be outdone by those who are being paid by the taxpayer to sit at home. They can have benefits, but they should not take advantage.

[Helen Whately]

That is an important point. Most people want to see a welfare system that supports those who really need help. They want to see a welfare system that is a safety net, not a lifestyle choice.

--- Later in debate ---

[Marsha De Cordova]

rose—

[Mark Pritchard]

rose—

[Helen Whately]

I will make a little progress.

Britain cannot be a cash machine for the world. Migrants come here believing that we will give them money, free healthcare and a house. This has to change. We will stop giving benefits and social housing to foreign nationals with indefinite or limited leave to remain, because being British has to count for something. That will save £9.5 billion and free up 230,000 social homes for British families who are stuck waiting. Labour Members should think about how much that will help British families facing homelessness.

We will save £1 billion by fixing loopholes in the household benefit cap and stopping households on benefits claiming endless cash, and a further £1 billion by rooting out fraud and error. Working families do not get a pay rise when they have another child, and families on welfare should not do so either, so we will bring back the two-child cap and save £3 billion. We will save an extra £4.5 billion by reforming housing benefit, which will include reforms that both Onward and the IFS have argued for. There will be no more asking taxpayers to pay for people on benefits to live in places where working people cannot afford to live, and we will save another half a billion pounds by tackling long-term unemployment. People who could be working but choose not to do so will have their benefits cut by a third after six months and be put on to a card, instead of receiving cash. Some people call this a nanny state measure, but it is not. It is not their money; it is taxpayers’ money.

Labour Members could show today that they understand the anger out there. They could show that they have found their moral compass—or are they going to keep on backing “Benefits Street”? We know where we stand. The Conservatives are on the side of people who get up, go to work and pay their taxes. They are the ones who fund our welfare system to support the seriously sick and disabled, and people who fall on hard times. Most people think our approach is the right thing to do. What they will not accept is being taken for a ride. We do not take their hard graft for granted, and it is time for Labour Members to decide where they stand.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Stephen Timms]

Let me tell the right hon. Lady about one of the welfare reform measures in that period. As she will well remember, disability living allowance was replaced by the personal independence payment in 2013. We were told by the Conservatives that that would save £2 billion a year. That saving never, ever materialised: it was never delivered. In 2017, they said they would save hundreds of millions a year by scrapping the higher benefit, on top of the universal credit standard allowance, payable to people in the intermediate category with limited capability to work. What happened was that large numbers moved instead on to the highest rate—up to the limited capability for work-related activity category. In that case, it was not simply that the saving did not materialise, which it certainly did not, but that they ended up spending a lot more. Even worse, once people had LCWRA status, the system no longer offered them help to find work. Those people were completely abandoned, which was a big part of the reason why this Government inherited 2.8 million people who were economically inactive on health grounds.

[Mark Pritchard]

The Minister has been in this place a very long time, and the whole House knows his experience on pensions and welfare reform. Can I just encourage him not to overextend his response today ahead of the Milburn report? There may be some contradictions between what he says today and what Lord Milburn says in his report about the importance of getting people into work and how that is compassionate. The most compassionate thing is getting people off benefits and into work, not topping up their benefits endlessly. He may find that the Milburn report takes a different view from some of the—forgive me—ideological points he has been making.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I have not been ideological at all; I am just telling the House what the previous Government did. Like the right hon. Gentleman, I am looking forward to the publication of the Milburn report, which, as the Prime Minister has just told us, will take place next week.