Social Security Benefits

Debate between Stephen Timms and Danny Kruger

Tuesday 4th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger]

Clearly, there are questions about the long-term sustainability of our pensions system and our national insurance fund, but I think the shadow Chancellor was talking about the very long term, rather than the immediate situation that we are in. There is no intention, on the Conservative Benches anyway, to review the triple lock at this stage.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

To clarify the position further, what happened was that the leader of the hon. Gentleman’s party was asked on LBC whether she would look at the triple lock, and her reply was,

“we’re going to look at means testing. Means testing is something which we don’t do properly here.”

What did she mean by that?

[Danny Kruger]

My right hon. Friend replied, “No”, to the interviewer. We are not looking at means-testing the triple lock. She was talking more generally about the challenge of means-testing in our social security system, which is a legitimate question for us all to consider, as I shall go on to discuss.

I did not want to get too partisan in this debate, but—[Interruption.] Here we go! No, I won’t, genuinely, because the challenge of our welfare system is a shared problem that we face across the House. I will note in passing that our party’s record on welfare is a good one. We introduced universal credit, rationalising the spaghetti web of benefits that we inherited from the right hon. Gentleman when he was last in office. We made work pay and helped people off welfare and into work, and we succeeded in that, with 4 million more people in employment in 2024 than in 2010.

Let me point out that we had another mess to sort out in the public finances. When we took office, the Government were running a deficit of 9% and the Treasury was spending way more than it was earning. By the time the pandemic struck, the deficit was down to less than 1%. We were living within our means and were able to afford the generous uplifts made to benefits and pensions in the last Parliament, as well as the huge package of support that we provided during the pandemic.

I want to be fair and admit that, as the Minister suggested, the welfare system is not working properly at the moment. Too many people are being consigned to a life of inactivity and dependency, especially via the categories of sickness benefit. It is bad for those people, their communities and the country as a whole, including the taxpayer, who spends £65 billion a year on incapacity and disability benefits, rising to £100 billion a year unless reforms are made by the end of this Parliament.

So what is going on? Those terrible figures reflect the fact that we have bad rates of physical ill health, including obesity and, as is strongly evidenced in the statistics, bad backs because we simply do not move around enough in the day. The figures also reflect a rise in mental ill health, which we see in alarming rates in schools and among young people. We have to do more on those issues through all sorts of interventions that lie more with the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care than with the Department for Work and Pensions. However, as the Lords Economic Affairs Committee reported last week, the rise in welfare claims cannot be attributed to worsening health or longer NHS waiting lists; the problem is growing far faster than that.

Perhaps the problem is low wages that do not attract people into employment, and that is certainly a reality. Low wages have driven demand for the immigration that we have seen get so out of control in recent years. Profound changes are under way in the world of work, away from secure employment towards a more precarious jobs market. Labour is destroying jobs, taxing employment and discouraging new hires with its new Employment Rights Bill. However, the fact is that wages have risen sharply above inflation in recent years, which is why pensions are going up by earnings this year. Employers are offering good wages but are not filling vacancies.

The issue is not health, although we have problems in health; the issue is not work, although we have big problems there—the issue is welfare. People are not being incentivised to take jobs because the offer from the welfare system is better. When I say welfare, I do not mean unemployment support. Thanks to universal credit and the last Government’s reforms, we saw record numbers of people move off unemployment benefit and into work. That is because we offered support to people to find work and imposed strict conditions that meant people had to actively look for a job. If they did not, they lost the benefit. That worked for a lot of people, but we found—here is the issue—that for a lot of other people, the incentives made them go the other way, further away from work into the sickness category, because that is where the good money is. In some cases, the money is double what they can get on unemployment benefit, and sometimes £3,000 more than the minimum wage. People almost certainly get it because the approval rates are high at over 90% for the limited capacity for work category.

This is big and unconditional money. There is no expectation to do anything about the health conditions that mean someone is signed off sick. There is no expectation of being reassessed any time soon or, indeed, ever. That is the challenge, and I hope the Government will rise to it in the same way that we rose to the crisis in unemployment benefit in the last decade.

Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Stephen Timms and Danny Kruger

Monday 3rd February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger (East Wiltshire) (Con)]

The media report that people in No. 10 are tearing their hair out in frustration at the DWP taking so long to come up with welfare reforms. We have already been waiting seven months, and now we are told it will be March before there is a Green Paper, and presumably there will be no actual legislation until the end of the year at the earliest—they will be totally bald in No. 10 by then! Given the constant rise in the welfare bill, what is the financial cost so far of Labour’s inactivity?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

The inactivity bequeathed to us by the previous Government had a huge cost. The shadow Minister may not have noticed that, the week before last, a judicial review was lost on the previous Government’s handling of the work capability assessment changes. The judge found that the consultation was, frankly, dishonest—it did not tell people what the changes entailed—and was too rushed. People did not have a chance to give their views.

We will do this exercise properly. This spring, in the Green Paper, we will set out the full details of what we propose, and there will be a very full consultation so that everyone has a chance to have their say.

[Danny Kruger]

The answer to my question is £1.8 billion. That is the cost of Labour’s economic inactivity and its failure to reform welfare since the election. The sum is the same as the saving from cutting the winter fuel payment plus the income from taxing family farms. In opposition, Labour opposed imposing conditions on people claiming incapacity benefits. Does the Minister still rule that out, or will the Green Paper face reality and require people to take action, where they can, to address the health needs that mean they are signed off work?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

The Green Paper will face reality square on. It will set out a very full set of clear policies, it will be frank about what they entail and we will listen to people’s views in response. The money that the hon. Gentleman refers to as having been forgone, will probably have been forgone as a result of the judicial review the week before last, which was because of the previous Government’s failures in consultation.

Assisted Dying

Debate between Stephen Timms and Danny Kruger

Monday 4th July 2022 Westminster Hall

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I have not seen the polls that the right hon. Member refers to, but I think it is the case that all the major organisations representing disabled people in the UK oppose this change in the interests of their members.

There are good and compassionate arguments—we have heard a number of them—in favour of the change that the petition calls for. I do not agree with those arguments, but let us be clear that they are not the only arguments for the change. In some minds, they are clearly not the decisive arguments either. As we have been told, in some countries where the change has been made, it is explicitly about saving the health service money.

My party introduced the national health service, which is our proudest achievement. It needs to be adequately funded. The fact that it is not being adequately funded at the moment must not become an excuse for giving up and accepting that painful deaths are unavoidable. Instead, as all right hon. and hon. Members have agreed so far in the debate, we need to invest in palliative care, where there have been big advances and where there could be many more, and to ensure that adequate care is provided to everybody who needs it.

I agree with the organisation Care Not Killing that we want

“a funded policy for comprehensive hospice, community and hospital specialist palliative care services across the country with a duty placed on NHS trusts to ensure these services are made available to all who need them.”

I visited my local children’s hospice on Saturday—we have heard from a number of Members who have made such visits—and it had a fête to raise funds, because it is struggling for cash. In my view, it should not have to do that.

“In Place of Fear” was how Nye Bevan summed up what had been achieved in founding the NHS. Let us not give up now and decide that we can no longer afford the relief from fear that he rightly promised.

[Danny Kruger]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I cannot give way again.

We should renew our determination not to impose fear and an awful moral dilemma on frail and conscientious elderly people approaching the end of their lives, and insist on modern palliative care for those who need it and a properly funded health service that supports living.