Welfare

Daniel Francis Excerpts

Wednesday 11th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Daniel Francis (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Lab)]

Following the scenario that we have just heard, my understanding is that the Conservatives believe that someone can pay their mortgage for 20 years, be retired on grounds of ill health or disability and then not pay the remainder of the mortgage, because it should not be possible for those who do not work to conclude their mortgages. Is that the position of the Conservative party?

[Helen Whately]

It sounds to me as if the hon. Member has wilfully misunderstood and misrepresented what my right hon. Friend the Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard) said a moment ago.

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[Sir Stephen Timms]

rose—

[Daniel Francis]

rose—

[Helen Whately]

I will not give way again. They will have their opportunity to speak in due course.

Let me remind the House of the things that the Labour Government have done—of which, no doubt, they are proud—to make benefits easier to claim and more generous. As soon as they entered office they cancelled our sicknote reforms, our PIP reforms, and our plans to update the work capability assessment to reflect the option to work from home. Then, one year in, they cobbled together some poorly thought through changes to save just £5 billion from the benefits bill. Even that was too much for Labour Back Benchers. In a moment of utter shambles—we have never seen anything like it—on the Floor of the House, in the middle of a debate, amid a flurry of concessions, they ripped up their own legislation. In true Labour fashion, the Bill ended up costing money instead of saving any.

One of those concessions was the Timms review of personal independence payment. I have a great deal of respect for the Disability Minister, but what hope is there for his review, given that it started out as a bargaining chip to buy off angry Back Benchers? No wonder it has ruled out making any savings. In fact, its recommendations so far will actually increase the benefits bill. It says that PIP is not generous enough and too hard to claim, although we know that one in six people on PIP admit that they face no extra cost for their condition, and “sickfluencers” sell scripts and model answers so that people can game the system.

Desperate to make his MPs like him again after his savings fiasco, Keir Starmer scrapped the two-child benefit cap despite promising that he would keep it. [Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] Labour Members are cheering again. I remember that they cheered at the time, but they got rid of him anyway. Let me remind them that nearly half a million households received an extra £5,000 in benefits, and about 75,000 received between £10,000 and £21,000 more. That is more than the income of someone working full time, just in extra money. People can see that this is a benefits bonanza.

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[Sir Stephen Timms]

I have not been ideological at all; I am just telling the House what the previous Government did. Like the right hon. Gentleman, I am looking forward to the publication of the Milburn report, which, as the Prime Minister has just told us, will take place next week.

[Daniel Francis]

I have been a member of the Labour party for 32 years, and I believe that being a member of the Labour party means supporting people in work. However, I have heard Conservative Members and the shadow Secretary of State repeat the claim today that everything was the fault of covid. Yet the statistics, both the absolute numbers and in percentage terms, from my borough—the London borough of Bexley—rose more from spring 2022 to spring 2024 than they did from spring 2020 to spring 2022, so the fault was not covid. The fault was that the Conservatives lost control of the system. Why, therefore, do they have any credibility in arguing this case?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and the increase in the number of NEETs at the end of the Conservatives’ term in office was particularly staggering.

Just setting out a list that adds up to a big number does not solve the problem. The Conservatives should have realised that by now. Theirs was a catastrophic record—waste, lost potential, moral failure—and we are not going to leave that unchanged. Too often, their system was writing people off instead of giving people the help and support they need. We are absolutely determined to fix the system we inherited, in the interests both of those who depend on benefits and of taxpayers who pay for them.

We have already narrowed the gap between what people get on the health element and the standard allowance in universal credit. That feature of the system, which the Conservatives left behind, was forcing people to aspire to be classed as too sick to work. The social security system simply should not force people to do that. The system should be encouraging people to look for work and providing the support to make work feasible. That is what we are reforming the system to do.

We are restoring face-to-face assessments for health benefits, and I am glad the shadow Secretary of State supports that. The number collapsed under the Tories, as they were never reinstated after the pandemic. We have also started to change the equation under which the last Government spent £25 on benefits for every £1 spent on opportunity, because the best way to bring benefits spending down is to put opportunity at the heart of the system and get people into work.

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[Daniel Francis (Bexleyheath and Crayford) (Lab)]

I start by declaring my interests. I chair the all-party parliamentary groups for wheelchair users and for access to disability equipment. I am also the parent of 13-year-old twins, one of whom I hope will work every day of her working life, and one of whom is on disability living allowance and, I know, will never work a single day of her life. I will refer to that lived experience later in my speech.

That is the lived reality for many people in this debate, and we need to listen to that. We need to listen to people like the hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling) and his lived experience. Some 75% of blind and partially sighted people in this country are not in work—a legacy of the last Government and something that this Government must get right. Again, while the Conservatives lecture us, that is the inheritance they left us. He is not currently in his place, but I thank the Minister for Social Security and Disability, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms), who visited my constituency last year to meet my disability charities, to hear their lived experience and to hear their good ideas for how things could work better.

This is not just a DWP issue. We will not get this right unless we look at what is going on in other Departments, such as the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Education. This morning I was with the Public Service Ombudsman as it launched its report into complaints about wheelchair contracts in the NHS. The report was clear that if we do not get those contracts right, wheelchair users will not return to work. On education, my goodness, we have inherited a hell of a mess in the SEND system, and a system that looked at excellence but not necessarily inclusion. Why are we therefore surprised that we have this crisis of people not being in education, employment or training? It is because we did not think about or plan for the long-term opportunities for those people.

We have left lots of young people on education, health and care plans post-16 in courses that are totally unsuitable for them, just as a way of extending the EHCP, and then we wonder why they do not have the skills needed for work. Sometimes they drop out of the system and become NEETs. The SEND reforms that this Government will bring forward will start to plan those matters so we work with those young people at that transition to understand their long-term prospects.

When I worked in retail it was not just a student job; I spent 11 years with Marks and Spencer—some of that time as a recruitment and HR manager, but most of it on the shop floor. A lot of my time was spent on these kinds of programmes with disabled people. A lot of that has gone by the way over the years, but this Government are bringing some of those schemes back. I go into the Bexleyheath store in my constituency and there are two people with learning disabilities who I worked with over 30 years ago who are still there in those jobs—jobs they are proud to have for their whole working lives. It is those schemes, which this Government are reinstating, that will bring that back.

As I said earlier, the real crisis with costs was not covid; it was 2022 to 2024, and the stats show that. My wife and I both had to give up full-time work in 2016, the year my child had 100 medical appointments, because it was unsustainable. I know from my lived experience of the impact on a family when they are drawn into that cycle of disability and carers and the problems that brings. It was a Conservative council that sent a social worker to my house and told us we would be better going on universal credit than trying to carry on part-time jobs and support our family in the best way we could. That kind of information, at the back end of the last Conservative Government, was given to families like mine, who were put on the scrapheap. This Labour Government will turn that around in the announcements we will make in the coming weeks, in the Milburn and Timms reviews, to finally reinstate that working support for disabled people in this country.

I will take no lectures on savings from the Conservatives. One of the first things I did with the previous Secretary of State, when I became an MP in 2024, was bring her the four-page letter my daughter had received every Christmas for eight years, telling her that she was going to get a £10 Christmas bonus—the money they were wasting sending people four-page letters every year, for eight years in my case, to tell them they were going to get a £10 bonus. They had no idea what was going on in their Department. The previous Secretary of State in our Government scrapped that letter at my request. The Conservatives have no room at all to start talking to us about waste in the Department.

Yes, there are reforms we need to make. Yes, there is more we will need to do to get disabled people back to work. I will support the savings, and there will be difficult conversations about the disabilities that people have, but I will never take lectures from the people who left us this mess.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

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[Dr Kieran Mullan (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

I have a solemn duty to talk about an incredibly difficult and challenging statistic in relation to the prosperity of this country: the size and scale of worklessness in our country right now. Some 6.7 million working-age people are claiming benefits and are not in work. That is one in six of our working-age population. I do not know how anyone can hear that statistic and not be horrified by what it represents for the prosperity of a country that seeks to do well. Historically, that figure has been around one in 10. It causes me particular concern, for a number of reasons, that today’s figure is related to an increase in claims for mental health challenges and disabilities.

We have talked about the challenges of ensuring that people do not feel stigmatised or labelled in a way that will not be conducive to their finding work. When it comes to mental health conditions such as depression, we have to recognise that getting in work and getting a job is advantageous to someone’s mental health, and that not working is a disadvantage to their mental health. I am afraid that there is also the challenge of fraud in the benefits system. We all have to accept that the benign view of human nature that we have heard expressed by Government Members, in which no one is ever induced or encouraged to make a claim that might not reflect their reality, is naive in the extreme.

[Daniel Francis]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Dr Mullan]

Let me finish my point.

The fact is that mental health conditions are almost entirely self-reported. People are asked questions that relate to how they feel, what their mood is and what they can or cannot do, and we must accept that that inevitably has a risk of inducing or encouraging people to exaggerate their claims. The hon. Member for Ealing Southall (Deirdre Costigan) is not in her place any more, but she inadvertently accepted that point when she talked about the disability living allowance, and how the changes that were made encouraged people to put in higher claims. That in itself is admitting that people say or do different things depending on the available incentives.

We must not forget that a welfare system does not exist in isolation; it is part of a wider society. All of us face a complex mixture of incentives and disincentives to do the right thing. There will be people at either end of the spectrum, but a lot of people are at a point in between. That is why I support our policies, which make it very clear that when it comes to access to cash, being on benefits is not the same thing as being in work, and it should not be the same thing. I support our plans to make the welfare state more about helping and supporting people with the things that they need, rather than just giving them money. That is also why I support our plans on the two-child benefit cap. We should never create a situation in which people who are working have to make tough decisions that those on benefits are excluded from having to make.

Government Members like to say that benefits are claimed by people in work, which is true, but the claimant numbers do not reflect how the money is spent. More than 80% of the money spent is spent on people who are not in work. A much smaller proportion of expenditure is on people who are in work. That is why I support the idea that the system should have two tracks: a track for people who have put into the system, who can then fairly ask more of it when they are in need, versus a track for people who have never put into the system. These are the incentives and disincentives that we all interact with in society. When I meet and speak to people on the frontline who work with people who are in poverty and claiming the support of charities and other sectors, they are very clear about that. They will freely talk about the people who come to see them—the people who they think are legitimate and really in need, and the people who they think are not. That is why I find it so extraordinary that Government Members never seem to want to acknowledge what we all know is a real pressure in society.

[Daniel Francis]

We heard from the hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling) that 20 or 30 years ago, a person born with a brain injury would be unlikely to survive. Today, such people survive and live with a disability for the rest of their life—people like my daughter. Is the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle (Dr Mullan) really saying that because those people have never paid in or contributed, they are not entitled to any help from the state?

[Dr Mullan]

That is not the system that we propose. We are talking about people who have had an opportunity to contribute and have not done so; the system should take that into account. That is a fair and reasonable point to make.

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[Joe Robertson (Isle of Wight East) (Con)]

No welfare system stands the test of time in perpetuity. Loopholes appear in all well-intentioned systems. People test the system, and the world does not stand still. That is why the last Conservative Government came into office with a plan to tackle the welfare bill that had ballooned under Labour, and they did tackle welfare.

The right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms) asked earlier in this debate, “In which years under the last Conservative Government did the welfare bill come down?” I am happy to be able to assist him. Under the last Conservative Government, the working welfare bill came down in 2012. It came down in 2013. It came down in 2014. It came down in 2015. It came down in 2016. It came down in 2017. It came down in 2018. It came down in 2019. Between 2010 and 2019, the working welfare bill came down by a fifth. That is the legacy of the last Conservative Government’s reforms.

I live in the real world, and I accept that covid changed everything. It changed the relationship between the individual and the state. From that time, the welfare bill started to climb. Those were the conditions that Labour knew it would have to deal with as it came into government, and it failed to deliver. Labour did not even have a plan to tackle the welfare bill, which it knew had been climbing year on year since covid.

At least the last Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, cobbled together some form of plan. It was a pretty rubbish plan, but a year and a half ago he tried to get some crude cuts through the House of only £5 billion-worth of savings. He failed, though, because the same MPs sitting opposite me now on the Government Benches stopped him. The current Prime Minister came into office a few months ago and flirted with the idea of bringing down the welfare bill, but he has given up entirely and he is proud of it. He is so proud that he will not bring the welfare bill down that he has ruled it out for the remainder of this Parliament.

The right hon. Member for East Ham has been tasked with finding savings, and he is about to publish his review into PIP. We know what will be in that review when it comes to savings: absolutely nothing, because the Prime Minister has already ruled it out. The Labour party is the welfare party. Its Members are proud of welfare spending going up and up. Just a few hours ago, at the Dispatch Box, the Prime Minister criticised our party’s plan to save £36 billion because it will hit incomes during a cost of living crisis. The system of benefits and personal independence payments is not intended to be an income top-up. It is not even means-tested. It is there to help people with a genuine need to meet the daily cost of a disability. I am afraid that the Prime Minister’s mask has slipped if he thinks it is there to serve as an income top-up during a cost of living crisis of his own making.

Let me now deal with some of the contributions from Labour Members. The hon. Member for Wirral West (Matthew Patrick) brought up the subject of child poverty. The best way to help hard-working families tackle child poverty is to make sure that they have well-paid jobs—to get off the backs of wealth creators, get off the backs of business and reverse the harmful job tax, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Bradley Thomas) has asked.

[Daniel Francis]

The hon. Member has accepted from the Dispatch Box that the Conservatives did completely lose control of the budget, but will he also accept that, contrary to what they keep saying on the airwaves and in the House, the numbers increased more between spring 2022 and spring 2024 than they did between spring 2020 and spring 2022? Moreover, covid was not the cause; the cause was the fact that, at the back end of their Government, they lost control of the economy, they lost control of our borders, they lost control of the SEND system, and they lost control of DWP budgets.

[Joe Robertson]

I fundamentally disagree with the hon. Member’s claim that covid and its legacy had no effect. I think he should go back and think again about what life was like during covid and in the aftermath.

I turn now to our plan. We will not make the mistake that the Labour party made in opposition. We will not sit by and let a system become more and more unfair without doing the hard graft. As my hon. Friend the Member for Solihull West and Shirley (Dr Shastri-Hurst) pointed out, it is not fair to leave the system as it is. Our plan includes £36.1 billion of welfare savings to help get Britain working. Ensuring support for people with genuine need is at the heart of it, and we will provide £1 billion for people with lower-level mental health conditions. That is new money to help them and ensure that we can make savings of £16.5 billion by removing them from the cash handout system, giving them the therapeutic support that they need instead.