Welfare

Natasha Irons Excerpts

Wednesday 11th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately]

I will not give way again. They will have their opportunity to speak in due course.

Let me remind the House of the things that the Labour Government have done—of which, no doubt, they are proud—to make benefits easier to claim and more generous. As soon as they entered office they cancelled our sicknote reforms, our PIP reforms, and our plans to update the work capability assessment to reflect the option to work from home. Then, one year in, they cobbled together some poorly thought through changes to save just £5 billion from the benefits bill. Even that was too much for Labour Back Benchers. In a moment of utter shambles—we have never seen anything like it—on the Floor of the House, in the middle of a debate, amid a flurry of concessions, they ripped up their own legislation. In true Labour fashion, the Bill ended up costing money instead of saving any.

One of those concessions was the Timms review of personal independence payment. I have a great deal of respect for the Disability Minister, but what hope is there for his review, given that it started out as a bargaining chip to buy off angry Back Benchers? No wonder it has ruled out making any savings. In fact, its recommendations so far will actually increase the benefits bill. It says that PIP is not generous enough and too hard to claim, although we know that one in six people on PIP admit that they face no extra cost for their condition, and “sickfluencers” sell scripts and model answers so that people can game the system.

Desperate to make his MPs like him again after his savings fiasco, Keir Starmer scrapped the two-child benefit cap despite promising that he would keep it. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] Labour Members are cheering again. I remember that they cheered at the time, but they got rid of him anyway. Let me remind them that nearly half a million households received an extra £5,000 in benefits, and about 75,000 received between £10,000 and £21,000 more. That is more than the income of someone working full time, just in extra money. People can see that this is a benefits bonanza.

[Natasha Irons (Croydon East) (Lab)]

More than half the households to have benefited from the lifting of the two-child limit have somebody who is in work. I wonder what the hon. Lady would say to those people, given that she is talking as if they do not work or contribute. The lifting of the limit will have helped their household, kept them in work and helped their children to not be in poverty.

[Helen Whately]

What would the hon. Lady say to people who are not on benefits, who ask, “Can we afford to have another child?”, and decide that they cannot? The fact is that someone who is in work and decides to have another child will not be given a pay rise.

None of what I am saying should come as a surprise, given that 204 Labour Members have more PIP claimants in their constituencies than the size of their majorities. No wonder the Welfare Secretary has said that all his MPs ask him is, who can they tax more in order to pay more benefits? Most Labour Members see no problem with the size of the welfare bill. The Disability Minister himself said that

“the current level of spending is not a great concern”,

but some of them know that the anger is building out there. People who work are getting tired of being taxed to the hilt to pay for people who do not. Some Labour MPs will desperately want to reassure their constituents. They will be hoping that the Timms and Milburn reviews will give them some succour, but they will not face the facts, and neither will they bring down the benefits bill. Labour spin doctors may try to say otherwise, but nobody is buying it.

The Conservatives are the only ones with a plan that backs welfare savings—no ifs, no buts. Our reforms will save £36 billion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Natasha Irons (Croydon East) (Lab)]

May life grant me the confidence, conviction, and lack of shame of a Conservative MP who is enraged by problems that they either helped to create or did nothing about when they had the chance. I do not think there has been a Conservative Government in my lifetime who have not said that they would cut welfare spending, and then attempted to blame their failure to do so on the sick, the poor and the young, and what we hear from the Opposition today is the same old approach, which would lead to the same old failures from the same old Tories.

I am old enough to remember when George Osborne promised us a high-wage, low-tax, low-welfare country. Instead, we saw child poverty skyrocket, food banks open in every community, young people written off, and a welfare bill that went up by a record £33 billion in the Conservatives’ last year in power alone. Opposition Members cannot be trusted to fix the welfare system, because they are unwilling to be honest about how the money would be spent, or to simply address the question of why people need support. They know full well that most of the welfare bill is spent on pensions, and that in the future, to protect pensions, decisions will have to be taken, such as on whether to adjust the triple lock. Instead, what we get from the Opposition is a bogus petition designed to stoke fear and division, proposals to push children back into poverty, and an open attack on the working poor. The Opposition’s proposals fail to acknowledge that 3.1 million people receiving universal credit this year are in work, that one in five working-age people receiving personal independence payments are in employment, and that 58% of households helped by the removal of the two-child benefit cap have at least one parent in work.

If we are genuinely to reduce dependency on welfare, we must tackle the things that make people need that support in the first place: low pay, poor health, the cost of housing and, perhaps most importantly, child poverty. As research from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows, young people who experience persistent childhood poverty are 3.4 times more likely to be out of education and employment by the time they turn 23. That should concern every Member of this House, because poverty does not simply disappear when a child turns 18; it can shape their education, health and opportunities for the rest of their life. If we fail to address those barriers today, we risk creating greater costs for our welfare system tomorrow.

The sad thing is that everyone in this House agrees that the system can and should be fixed, because a system that spends £1 on support for every £25 on benefits is not right. Is it time to do this differently, and to work across the House to design a system that is about lifting people up, instead of writing them off? I am proud that this Labour Government have removed the two-child benefit cap and lifted half a million children out of poverty. I welcome the £3.5 billion investment in employment support for the sick and disabled. Reducing welfare dependency cannot simply mean reducing the support that people need; it should mean reducing the need for that support in the first place, and that cannot be achieved by the same old approach that leads to the same old failures from the same old Tories.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dr Mullan]

That is not the system that we propose. We are talking about people who have had an opportunity to contribute and have not done so; the system should take that into account. That is a fair and reasonable point to make.

[Natasha Irons]

The hon. Member is talking about contributions and people who have contributed. Does that include foreign nationals?

[Dr Mullan]

I do not think that foreign nationals should be entitled to benefits, because of the basis on which they are allowed into our country. The only reason they are allowed into our country is that they are net contributors. Why would we undermine that by allowing them to be net recipients of benefits? They are only here because they have signed up to the idea that they will come and be net contributors, so I do not think that that entitles them.

[Natasha Irons]

Just so that I am clear, if somebody is born in another country, comes here and gets citizenship or indefinite leave to remain, and has contributed to the system because they have been working, should they be able to claim from the system? That was my question. They may well have been a high earner, but they may have fallen on hard times and fallen back on the system that we all rely on, and they may have contributed to that system.

[Dr Mullan]

They are citizens, are they not? They have signed a deeper contract with the country that they are in, and they are here under a different set of circumstances. The hon. Member needs to be clearer when she asks her questions in relation to two different groups of people, because we treat them very differently in our proposals. There is a distinction.

Let me make a final point that is often not talked about enough. We are all incredibly focused on what the Government should do to help people and how taxpayers should help people. We know that for very many people in poverty, a big factor in that is having absent parents who give them absolutely no money or pitiful amounts of money for very many years. We also know that a large proportion of families with children who are in absolute poverty would not be in poverty if an absent parent who is not paying was paying.

I wish that there was as much focus on the dereliction of duty that parents too often show to their children and the complete failure for decades to tackle that issue, across all parties, as there is on what taxpayers and the state should deliver. That is a significant moral failing that we are too shy to talk about in this country, and it does not get the attention that it needs. If all parents, whether they have split up or are together, contributed to the upkeep of their children, we would see a lot less child poverty; I wish that MPs on all sides of the House were as invested in that issue as they are in deciding how much the state should pay in their place.