Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill

Debate between Paul Holmes and Kemi Badenoch

2nd reading
Tuesday 1st July 2025 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Badenoch]

I definitely will not agree with the hon. Gentleman. He is talking about relative poverty figures. The fact is that the best way to get people out of poverty is to get them into work—something we did again and again and again.

The Bill is more incoherent now than it was at the beginning. It does not do the job at all. Reforms that were not enough in the first place will now cut only £2 billion from a ballooning budget, instead of £5 billion. They will create a new welfare trap and a two-tier welfare system. Right up until the last moment, the Government kept pushing and pushing, ruling out changes and sending their poor, weary Ministers and ambitious Back-Bench bootlickers out on to the airwaves. At the last moment, as we have seen before, the Government abandon them after all of that—they have been hung out to dry.

The Government do not care how they have made their Back Benchers look, and it is not for the first time. Week after week, the Chancellor was sent here to say with a straight face that she was right to cut the winter fuel payment, that there would be no turning back and that the country’s finances would simply collapse if she did not take pensioners’ fuel money and give it to the trade unions, and her Back Benchers sucked that one up. They muttered and they grumbled, but each of them went back and told their constituents that the winter fuel payments were being confiscated to fix the foundations.

Only once pensioners had sat in the cold all winter, the Chancellor had tanked the economy and Labour MPs had had the door slammed in their face up and down the country did they finally accept that it was a mistake. This time, when asked to line up behind a Bill that takes money from older, disabled people with physical disabilities—a Bill that, according to the Government’s own modelling, gets no one into work—funnily enough, lots of Labour MPs did not fancy another go. Perhaps they will think twice next time the Chancellor comes to them with a bad idea.

[Paul Holmes]

The Prime Minister’s inability to control his Back Benchers means that the Chancellor now has to find an extra £2.5 billion to fill the savings that she is claiming to have made. Can the Leader of the Opposition guess how she might raise that money?

[Mrs Badenoch]

The fact that the Government have refused to commit to not raising taxes means it is probably inevitable that they will. However, it is quite clear that Labour MPs will feel emboldened to push for more unaffordable changes to our welfare system, including the two-child benefit cap.

Let us be clear: part of the reason why these plans have been so rushed and badly thought through is the mess the Chancellor has made. This Bill is an attempt to find the quickest and crudest savings possible—to plug the hole in the public finances that she has created—but the Chancellor is not the only one to blame. It beggars belief that the Labour party came into office after 14 years in opposition with no serious plan for reforming welfare. What was Labour doing all that time? The welfare bill is already totally unsustainable, and it is only getting worse.