Disability benefit cuts set to challenge Labour MPs' resolve

Another week, another showdown. 

Still riding high with an unassailable majority less than 12 months since the general election, the Labour government remains keen to test the resolve of its backbench MPs who are tasked with explaining national policy to constituents. 

Today’s announcement by Secretary of State Liz Kendall of significant reforms to the non-work-related benefits regime is perhaps the most significant example yet of the Starmer government’s willingness to face down calls from the charity sector, from the back benches and even from cabinet members themselves to drive through reforms viewed as central to the government’s missions.

Focus on disability benefits as a ballooning element of overall public spending has been growing since before the election. The inflection point, as in so many areas of public life, appears to have been the Covid pandemic, with an elevated rate of new claims – particular claims related to mental & psychiatric conditions – being made compared with 2019. 

The UK is something of an outlier in that rates of economic inactivity have yet to return to pre-Covid levels, and disability benefits are seen as a major contributing factor. As Kendall pointed out more than once in the Commons, with new Personal Independence Payment (PIP) claims being approved at a rate of 1,000 per day, a group equivalent to the population of Leicester is coming on to the benefit every year. 

With the overall disability benefits bill slated to reach up to £100 billion by the end of this parliament, today’s £5 billion cut has been communicated as essential to complying with the Chancellor’s fiscal rules and bringing more people back into the workforce. In particular, the rates of young people not in either employment, education or training (one in eight by some estimates) has been the focus of much pre-announcement briefing from the Government.

The rollout of the changes has perhaps differed from prior announcements by virtue of the government being able to get to the end of a sentence without other pressing issues – domestic or foreign – side-swiping its agenda. Spokespeople have focused on the ‘moral case’ for reform as much as on fiscal reasoning, and the government will be hoping that when viewed in the round, elements of the overall package will provide sufficient comfort to encourage Labour MPs to vote for the measures.

Among these, a rise in the base rate of Universal Credit, abolition of the widely disliked work capability assessment (WCA) and £1 billion extra for employment supports are likely to be supported by some campaigners. Additionally, giving benefit claimants the ‘right to try’ a job without risking a loss of benefits if it doesn’t work out is among the elements of the package that can fairly be labelled ‘incentive tweaks’ rather than ‘cuts’.

On the other hand however, the chorus of mental health and disability charities to have come out against the announcement, and the string of awkward questions from Labour MPs, indicates that any support given from these quarters will be grudging at best. 

Protecting the welfare state and the rights of the disadvantaged is, as frequently noted this week, among the main reasons that Labour politicians enter politics to begin with. Voting for measures to cut disability benefits is likely to be among the bitterest pills the government could ever ask them to swallow.

There are of course, alternative perspectives, and the view of the Labour party as ‘the party of work’ – as opposed to benefits – has had a strong airing this week.

Among the most considered expressions of this perspective cam from SEC Newgate’s Labour expert Greg Rosen in The Times’ ‘Thunderer’ column last Thursday:

“Some believe the government’s aim to tackle the ballooning welfare bill betrays Labour’s roots. But those who forged the Labour Party and the welfare state it created — Labour’s founder Keir Hardie and the great 1945-51 Attlee government — took a far stronger stance on requiring welfare recipients to seek work than is commonly understood now”.

For more detailed insight on this and many other areas of policy, please get in touch at: advocacy@secnewgate.co.uk