Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill

Danny Kruger Excerpts

Committee of the whole House & 3rd reading
Wednesday 9th July 2025 Commons Chamber

[The Chairman of Ways and Means (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Danny Kruger (East Wiltshire) (Con)]

So here we are. Labour has had 15 years, including 14 years spent complaining about welfare reform while the Conservative Government fixed the catastrophic mess of unemployment benefits that we inherited—the alphabetti spaghetti of welfare that we had in 2010, if any of their Members can remember it. We fixed all those benefit traps, introducing universal credit, making work pay and supporting people off welfare and into jobs. In the first decade of our time in government, 100,000 fewer people were economically inactive every single year of the 2010s. In 2019 we had the lowest number of workless households since records began. Then covid hit, and Labour were clamouring for more welfare throughout that period. After the covid incident, as we left office we were introducing reforms to fix the health and disability benefits system. All of that was opposed every step of the way by Labour.

[Dr Tidball]

Does the shadow Minister really believe that anyone could truly think that the Conservatives ensured that disabled people were well paid when 14 years of their government led to a 17% disability pay gap?

[Danny Kruger]

The fact is, in our time in government we increased the number of disabled people in work significantly. Two million more disabled people were in work at the end of our time in government than before. There is much to regret about the last years of our time in government, and I was a critic of them myself, but on welfare throughout our time in government we have a proud record of improving the broken system that we inherited.

We are now a year into Labour’s time in government. They have had all this time to come up with a plan and we have absolutely nothing. Clause 5 did have some changes to the system, but they are going to scrap that today. I want to pay tribute to the rebels on the Labour Benches for finding their voice and showing what Parliament can do, and I particularly pay tribute to the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell)—the real Prime Minister sitting there on the real Front Bench. I respect and honour them all.

As for the Government Front Bench, they are chopping the Bill’s title in half. It is now nothing to do with PIP, so we have no reform to welfare and certainly no savings. This is now a spending Bill, not a savings Bill. Looking at the impact assessment that has just been published—the third in the last three weeks, I think—if we add up the savings from cutting UC health for new claims, which is a little over £5 billion, and minus the cost of raising the standard allowance, which is a little over £5 billion, we get £120 million of extra costs over the next four years, plus the £1 billion of extra employment support. Labour’s idea of saving money on welfare is to spend more by the end of the Bill’s passage. The Government have also spent the money that they thought they were saving from the PIP changes before they did the U-turn. Even now they are on a wing and a prayer financially.

The Office for Budget Responsibility, on which the tottering Chancellor has relied to hold up her sums, assumes that the on-flow to benefits will fall halfway back to their 2019 levels over this Parliament. If they do not, the Chancellor will have to find another £12 billion. Why should new claims reduce under this Government when there is still an incentive of £50 a week to get on to UC health, and there is no reform to PIP for at least another year? The Minister has also said that his famous eponymous review is not aimed at saving money anyway. The hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman) challenged him earlier to confirm that, and I think he has confirmed from the Dispatch Box that there will be no savings from his review.

Meanwhile, the UK is haemorrhaging jobs thanks to the national insurance rise, and we have the Employment Rights Bill coming down the track. The OBR did not even include in its forecast the likely impact of the unemployment Bill that Labour is introducing. That is something we can look forward to in the autumn.

We are in a deep fiscal hole, and of course we need welfare reform—in fact, we need welfare cuts. That is why the Opposition wanted to support the Government when they set out their intentions, and we said that we would support the Bill if they reduced spending, got more people into work and pledged that there would be no new taxes, but they did none of that, so we do not support it. We do, however, have a further set of proposals.

My friend, the hon. Member for Hendon (David Pinto-Duschinsky), challenged me to come up with some alternatives, and we have some amendments to that very effect. First, amendment 45 would improve the quality of assessments. There is a bigger piece of work to be done, and I welcome the Government looking closely at the assessments process, but right now we could make one clear and simple improvement. In 2019, 84% of PIP assessments were conducted face to face; last year, the figure was 5%. That was a covid change—[Interruption.] That was absolutely a covid change that was not changed back in time; I totally agree. The fact is, the work-from-home culture really took off at the DWP and with its subcontractors, and that does need to change. I recognise that. Why are the Government not doing that?

As a result, in the system we have, which is not being changed by the Bill, people are at the mercy of some distant, faceless assessor on the end of the phone. Of course, there will be people who cannot manage a face-to-face assessment, and we would authorise the Secretary of State to specify circumstances for that. It is also right not to call people back for repeat assessments. That was a change that the Conservatives were introducing, and I am glad that the Government are sticking with it. But, for the great majority of cases, we have got to get back to face-to-face assessments for the sake of claimants as well as the taxpayer.

Secondly, I turn to amendment 50. We have 1,000 new PIP claims a day—that has doubled since covid—and more than half the increase is in mental health cases. For UC health claims, it is more like three quarters. Of course, distress is real in our society and it is rising—I do not disparage the reality of many of these claims—but as the Minister has said the incidence of disability in our society is rising by 17% while benefit claims are rising by 34%. For some of the less severe mental health claims, it is far worse. In January 2020, there were 7,000 claims for people with anxiety disorders; this year, there are 31,000. In January 2020, there were 155,000 claims for anxiety and depressive disorders mixed; now there are 365,000. Autism was 60,000 and has gone up to 183,000. The hon. Member for Sheffield Hallam (Olivia Blake) mentioned ADHD, which has gone up from 29,000 to 115,000 over the last five years.

[Nadia Whittome]

I wonder whether the shadow Minister realises that according to the DWP’s own statistics the PIP fraud rate is 0.2%. I do not want him to feel like a mug.

[Danny Kruger]

I am not talking about explicit fraud. These awards are being given, and no doubt the assessment is judging them to be eligible. There is not necessarily a deliberate attempt to defraud the system. What we have done is create a system whereby one is incentivised to seek higher and more expensive claims.

[Olivia Blake]

rose—

[Danny Kruger]

I am happy to give way.

[The Chairman of Ways and Means (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. Before the hon. Member makes her intervention, will colleagues make sure that their language is parliamentary and respectful?

[Olivia Blake]

I want to pull up the shadow Minister on the ADHD statistics. Will he recognise that women were not recognised as having ADHD for many years and thus there is a backlog of women now accessing their right to benefits relating to ADHD? Many women like me were misdiagnosed with depression and anxiety disorders instead of ADHD.

[Danny Kruger]

I am sure that the hon. Lady is right. Those disorders have also increased extraordinarily in recent years. I take her point, and I was struck by the point she made in her speech about how many people with ADHD would benefit from being in the workplace. They could be in work, and they need to be supported for that. It is not right that we are consigning so many people to a life on the sofa with the curtains drawn, being told that they have no value and no contribution to make and will receive no help. Last year, 4,000 more people got PIP because of dyslexia, which was twice the number before covid. It was 10,000 for OCD; again, that number has doubled.

I want to acknowledge that the charity Mind—of course, it wants to increase benefits, so I do not cite it in support of our amendments—has said that what people with mental health conditions need is decent mental health support, proper employment programmes and flexible workplaces. That is what is needed.

Let me finish with new clause 12. The other place where we can look for real savings is with foreign nationals claiming health and disability benefits. I am aware that many visas have no recourse to public funds, but people with indefinite leave to remain do. Some 800,000 people are likely to claim indefinite leave to remain in the course of this Parliament. We do not have enough data from the DWP, so I urge the Government to have more transparency about the information that is received. However, on the basis of the information we have, we believe that some hundreds of thousands of people in this country who are claiming PIP and UC health are foreign nationals—that does not include EU citizens, who have rights under the withdrawal agreement. Welfare is simply not part of the contract that we make with people who come to this country. They are given visas on the basis that they will support themselves and our amendment would make that principle real.

Every pound spent on benefits for someone who could be supported into work is a pound less for someone else who cannot or can never work and who deserves all our sympathy and support. We cannot wait another year for this dithering, hamstrung Government to come forward with the changes we need. Our amendments offer a path to a better system that is fair for claimants and fair for taxpayers, and I commend them to the Committee.