Social Security Benefits

Debate between Steve Darling and Danny Kruger

Tuesday 4th February 2025 Commons Chamber

[Danny Kruger]

I am grateful for the opportunity. We had a whole series of plans that were sadly interrupted by the general election result, and I will come on in a moment to some of the suggestions I have for where the Government might go.

[Steve Darling (Torbay) (LD)]

The hon. Gentleman was talking about incentivising people into work. In my surgeries in Torbay, I find that an awful lot of people are off sick with hip problems or mental health challenges, and the challenge people have in getting back into work is the broken health system that was left by the previous Conservative Government. I hope the new Government will drive harder on fixing the system, because many people on benefits are keen to get back into work; they are just unfit for work.

[Danny Kruger]

The hon. Gentleman reflects the experience that many of us have had in our surgeries. Nevertheless, I do not think that health reform on its own will do the job. As I mentioned, the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee has looked into the matter and reported last week, pointing out that the increase in welfare claims cannot be attributed to longer waiting lists or, indeed, to worsening health conditions. The welfare problem is outstripping the problems we see in the nation’s health, so we have to do more in the DWP. We wait with bated breath to see some movement on that front.

In fact, it was in this debate last year when we were uprating benefits that the hon. Member for Birkenhead (Alison McGovern), now a ministerial colleague of the right hon. Member for East Ham, said that, “Labour has a plan”. That was a year ago. Seven months ago, Labour won the election. She did not say that the plan was oven-ready, but she implied it. I know the Minister says that the delay is because of a court case that happened two weeks ago, but I do not quite understand how that explains the delay that has been going on for seven months.

Here we are approving a measure that will increase expenditure by nearly £7 billion, as the right hon. Gentleman said, and we have no idea how the bill will be brought down over time. But after much head scratching in the DWP—and, we are told, people pulling their hair out in No. 10—we are getting closer to the big reveal. We hear exciting hints in the media that the Government might scrap the limited capacity for work category altogether, scrap the work capability assessment, merge employment and support allowance into the personal independence payment system, or require people on sickness benefits to engage with work coaches. I am encouraged by all that pitch-rolling.

If the Government are softening up their Back Benchers for serious reform, I applaud them for it, but I will believe it when I see it, because Labour opposed every step towards tougher conditions, more assessments and more incentives to work. They opposed reforms that we were introducing to the fit note system. In fact, I see from a written answer to a question in the other place that the Government say they have no plans to reform the fit note system, which I regret. I wonder whether the Minister could help clarify if that is the case.

On universal credit, it appears that the sinner repenteth, or sort of repenteth. The Government are on some kind of journey. In the last Parliament, they said they would scrap universal credit, then they said they would replace it, and now, as we have heard, they are reviewing it. I am glad to hear that, although the right hon. Gentleman just said that they are reviewing it over the course of this year, so that seems to be unrelated to the Green Paper process, which we are expecting in the spring. I would like to understand how those two processes are aligned.

Rather than scrapping, replacing or reviewing universal credit, I invite the Government simply to use it. It is a flexible system, as we saw during the pandemic, and it works; it just needs to be adapted to the new challenge. In conclusion, let me make a few suggestions for the right hon. Gentleman to consider as he prepares his Green Paper and his universal credit review.

The back to work plan that we announced before the general election would have got 1.1 million people into work, using more support and tougher conditions—“more support” meaning more of the WorkWell pilots that my hon. Friend the Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) introduced. I was glad to hear the Secretary of State praising those pilots yesterday, although sadly without attribution. In our view, the work capability assessment should be face to face, and it should be asset-based, not deficit-based; it should be asking what a claimant can do, not what they cannot do. The claimant should begin the journey of recovery—the journey back towards work—then and there. Rather than budgeting for ever higher welfare, as we are doing today, we should be investing in a universal support system to run alongside universal credit.

We also need tougher conditions. We simply cannot have people with a bad back or anxiety being signed off sick for the rest of their lives; they need to know that we believe in them, and that believing in them means having high expectations of them. In exchange for benefits paid for by working people, claimants should take active steps, when they can, to address their physical and mental health needs, and they should work meaningfully on their own health and wellbeing. That will not look the same for everyone and it must not be a tick-box exercise. That is why we need the help of civil society, not just coaches and therapists, providing the human touch and the range of help and opportunities that people need.

Most of all, we need a clear message to go out from the Government that unless a person is so severely disabled or ill that they genuinely can never work at all, they will not have a life on benefits. That clear message, enacted through reform that the right hon. Gentleman’s Department must bring forward urgently, is the only way to get our exorbitant welfare bills under control, and to get our workforce and our economy moving again.