Welfare

Priti Patel Excerpts

Wednesday 11th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sir Stephen Timms]

The hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent claimed that spending had been reduced; it never was. That never happened, and it would not happen under the proposals she talked about, as I will come to in a moment.

These latest ill thought through proposals show that the Conservatives have learned nothing from their time in government. They are making exactly the same mistakes all over again in opposition: crude cuts to put more people into poverty; more people pushed on to disability benefits; 1 million young people not in education, employment or training; and an explosion in the welfare bill. Those are crude cuts, with no thought for the human costs, which means that savings will never materialise. How much would their proposals increase child poverty? How much would they increase homelessness? How much would they add to their costs of failure?

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

I have a great deal of time for the Minister, and we have worked together on many welfare and other issues in the past, but does he not recognise that in the five-year period between 2010 and 2015, the number of workless households fell by 600,000? Can he please explain to the House, including his hon. Friends, why his party when in opposition—after the financial crisis and the former Labour Government had let unemployment go up—voted against every single welfare reform measure put forward by that Conservative Government?

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. After the next speaker, there will be a five-minute limit. Dame Priti Patel.

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to contribute to the debate and to have heard speeches from both Front Benches. It is also good to be debating again with the Minister for Social Security and Disability, the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms), with whom I have had similar debates on welfare reform, from the opposite side of the House, a few times in the past.

I am intrigued by what I have heard so far, although Back-Bench contributions have been limited. I think everyone in the House will agree that we have a moral duty and responsibility to ensure the welfare system in this country is functional and does what it says on the tin. It should be a safety net for those who are in need of support, and we should all work together to find ways to get more people back into work. There is no dispute on that whatever.

The hon. Member for Gedling (Michael Payne) just quoted my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) when he was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. I was his Minister of State, and at that time we were undertaking regression analysis to ensure there were the right taper levels so that work paid and there were the right incentives for people on universal credit. There is a lot of technicality behind this, and with regard to those circumstances, I am afraid that the hon. Member’s quotation of my right hon. Friend was not totally accurate. I was proud to serve with my right hon. Friend in that Government and of the work we undertook.

[Josh Fenton-Glynn]

The right hon. Lady talks about incentivising people to get back into work. In the £36 billion of savings, can she point to where the investment in getting people back into work is?

[Priti Patel]

There is plenty of investment, starting with the work that needs to take place at the Treasury to stop putting burdens on businesses. We can have the same conversation in the other debate later this afternoon.

Back in 2010, we inherited a fiscal position in which £1 in every £4 spent was borrowed. When up against a weak fiscal position, the Government of the day have a duty to ensure they incentivise work, get more people off welfare and back into work—particularly at a time when unemployment had been rising. [Interruption.] If the hon. Member listens and goes back and looks at how the last Conservative Government did, he will know that is the case.

We saw around 1 million young people who were not in education, employment or training. Within five years, as I said in my intervention on the Minister, the number of workless households had fallen by 600,000. Over 370,000 fewer children were growing up in households where no one had a job. That is really important, because employment levels for single parents and those with disabilities and barriers to employment had also increased. Of course, it was the combination of the Work programme—all colleagues in the House should give some time to look at this—universal credit and welfare reforms that encouraged more people into work and gave them something we should all care about: the security and dignity that comes with having a job.

None of this is easy. This afternoon, we will hear lots of point scoring, but I stood at the Government Dispatch Box along with my hon. Friends to do the heavy lifting on welfare reform. In fact, it was prior to 2010, during the Government in which the Minister served—I think he was in the Treasury; he may correct me if I am wrong—that the Work programme first came into the public domain. We all heard about how the Work programme was all about working with employers and giving them incentives to do much more to get people into work. That also led to young people getting into work and more apprenticeships.

Apprenticeship starts are not straightforward; we have to incentivise them. People with disabilities had been written off—that was why we had Disability Confident, and I am pleased to hear that more work is being done to look at that scheme to get more people into work. All those people had been written off under previous Governments.

In the past, it was easier to sign people off than to create pathways to meaningful employment. We all have a duty to work with businesses in our constituencies to help people get into work. Madam Deputy Speaker, I am sure you saw in your constituency that employment rates increased for those signed off and on benefits. We also saw a halving of youth unemployment. Those are the things that had been achieved under previous Governments. Then, of course, we had the pandemic—we have heard about that—which absolutely changed the situation.

Under previous Conservative Governments, in every debate, every question time and every Budget—this is why I made the point I did to the Minister—our welfare reforms were not supported universally in the House, including by Labour Members. As the Minister does now, I fielded endless questions, urgent questions and Westminster Hall debates from Labour Members who simply could not accept that supporting people into employment and reducing welfare dependency was the right thing to do for those who had become trapped on welfare.

Nothing is worse than seeing families trapped on welfare, with the intergenerational welfare dependency that creates. All credit to colleagues, including former Secretaries of State, who worked hard to tackle that. We have a duty to find ways to reduce the costs for taxpayers and to do more to create pathways to work.

[Alex McIntyre (Gloucester) (Lab)]

The right hon. Lady says that there is nothing worse than seeing a family on benefits, but there was something worse between 2010 and 2015. In 2010, the Trussell Trust had 35 food banks in this country, but by 2015, it had 1,375 handing out 1.1 million food parcels a year. Does she agree that seeing a family not able to feed themselves and their kids, despite being in work and perhaps receiving some welfare, might be worse than having a welfare state supporting them?

[Priti Patel]

I remember what that time was like, and I remember the arguments about food banks—there were endless debates in the House about that. Is the hon. Member telling me that food bank usage has declined? It simply has not, and that is a stain on our society. [Hon. Members: “It has!”] I am afraid that is not correct. Why are we having this debate? It is because the welfare state is growing, and it is unsustainable. There are more people out of work now.

Labour Members cannot say hand on heart that their employment policies are helping the employment market. They should come to the Witham constituency, or go to any constituency, where they will see employers—family-run businesses—struggling to recruit and employ people because of Labour’s regressive taxation policies. Higher levels of employment tax mean more unemployment, which means more people going on to welfare. These are the basic policies—[Interruption.] There is no point in trying to point score; these are basic policies that the House has to get right.

There has to be recognition right now that the current policies are not helping people get into work. It is too easy to write off people on welfare, but all credit to Opposition Front-Bench Members who are saying things that people do not want to hear. Too many labels are being attributed to people out there in society that write them off. That is a stain on society. We should be helping them and working with employers to incentivise them back into work, not just have them trapped in welfare and benefit dependency.

[Dr Mullan]

On employers, there are various, complex ways in which the Government are trying to unpick the damage they did with their tax rises. Big businesses will engage with such projects—they can look at them for use across their entire workforce—but smaller businesses cannot as they do not have the mental thinking space or the time to go through them. We have seen the biggest drop in employment among those smaller businesses—the people who speak to me and tell me how bad things are—but the Government seem to be completely ignoring that.

[Priti Patel]

My hon. Friend is right. The Minister mentioned the British Retail Consortium in relation to young people. Yes, the BRC is a nationwide organisation, but across parts of the country—the east of England, and I am sure Sussex as well—family-run businesses do not have the ability to work at that level. It is the same in the hospitality trade. We are seeing this again and again.

We see it with first jobs. For many of us, our first ever jobs were behind tills, washing up or in the service sector. As everybody knows, in my family I grew up under the till, because my family ran small shops, but while employability skills are so valuable, those experiences have gone and it is harder to get a job. That is what we are lacking right now.

I commend my hon. Friends on the Opposition Front Bench for doing the hard yards in looking at how we can be better and proposing solutions and alternatives. They might not fit everybody—it is right that we debate and discuss them—but the House must recognise that the current situation is totally unsustainable. We need to do better by those trapped in welfare and give young people in particular opportunities and hope and create pathways for good future employment.