Oral Answers to Questions
Helen Whately Excerpts(1 week, 3 days ago)
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Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
In the Budget last month, the Chancellor put up taxes in order to spend £16 billion more on welfare. The Government chose to make working people worse off in order to spend more on benefits. The sickness benefit bill is now set to skyrocket to more than £100 billion by the end of this decade. The Secretary of State likes to blame us, but his predecessor, the right hon. Member for Leicester West (Liz Kendall), cancelled our reforms, and Labour Back Benchers stymied the Government’s. Working people are saying to me, “Why bother? I’d be better off on benefits.” The country cannot afford that. The Secretary of State must know this—he is no fool—so when is he going to come up with some welfare savings?
Pat McFadden
The Conservatives’ zeal for change is very touching; it is just a pity that they only discovered it the day they stopped having any responsibility for running the welfare system. Let me remind the hon. Lady that this is the system that they created, and these are the gateways to benefits that they created. The reform that they put forward was struck down by the courts, and the incentives in the system that she attacks are the ones that they legislated for. Now we have begun to change the system, with the first change in universal credit incentives for years, more support for the long-term sick and disabled, and a youth guarantee that offers hope where previously there was only neglect.
Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
I was sorry that the Secretary of State could not answer the question from my hon. Friend the Member for South Northamptonshire (Sarah Bool) earlier. Fortunately, there are people who can help. For instance, UKHospitality has told us that 100,000 people will lose their jobs because of the Budget. That is on top of the 150,000 jobs already lost since Labour came to power. At this rate, there will be queues forming outside jobcentres. Can she tell me what preparations the Government are making to cope with the influx of benefit claimants from all these job losses?
Dame Diana Johnson
May I just say gently to the shadow Secretary of State that she seems to be suffering from amnesia? We know that in the last four years of the previous Government, the number of NEETs increased by 50%. This is the Government who are going to do something about NEETs. We have our youth guarantee and our commitment to a subsidised job opportunity for those who have been out of work for 18 months or more. This is the Government who will tackle the NEETs problem.
Helen Whately
Businesses are cutting jobs at the fastest rate since the pandemic and unemployment has gone up every month under this Government, but clearly they are not ready to deal with the consequences. The number of jobcentre work coaches has actually fallen since they took over. No doubt the Minister will proudly tell us that they have just announced millions of pounds of spending on Government-created jobs for young people, but may I ask her to reflect for a moment? After hiking taxes on businesses so that they cannot afford to employ young people, the Government are spending a load of that tax on state-subsidised jobs for the same young people. Some are calling this the economics of the madhouse, but I simply call it Labour economics. Does the Minister not agree that the Government should get out of the way and reduce the burden on businesses so that they can create jobs, opportunities and economic growth?
Dame Diana Johnson
Of course we want employers and businesses to create jobs, but let me reiterate—as I am not sure that the shadow Secretary of State heard my earlier answer—that for the under-21s, no national insurance contributions are payable by an employer. Let me also refer her to my first answer and repeat that more than 329,000 more people are in work this year.
Pension Schemes Bill
Helen Whately ExcerptsWednesday 3rd December 2025
(2 weeks, 1 day ago)
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Steve Darling
Thank you for the audio description!
There is much to be welcomed in the Bill, and the way that we rattled through it in Committee demonstrated that there is lots of good within it. However, as a constructive Opposition and a critical friend, I will spend most of my time reflecting on where there could be improvement.
We Liberal Democrats still feel that there are chances to ensure a mid-life MOT on investment opportunities, including five years before retirement. We think that that could be strengthened significantly. I come from an area of sadness in respect of my father, who saw the poverty of his father, a lorry driver, and threw significant amounts of his income into his personal pension just before the 1998 stock market crash. He saw the value of his investment halved. Nobody would expect a lorry driver to understand the full ins and outs of investing in the appropriate manner. It is important to reflect the fact that people live their lives without really understanding financial markets, and further strengthening that part of the Bill would be welcome.
Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
As this Bill nears the end of its journey through our House, I take a moment to acknowledge some of the people who have played their part, whether that is former Pensions Ministers, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott), the former hon. Member for Hexham, my hon. Friend the Member for Wyre Forest (Mark Garnier), who cannot be with us today, or my hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon (Rebecca Smith), who also cannot be here today. My hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (James Wild) did such a brilliant job speaking earlier this afternoon. I also thank the hard-working members of the Bill Committee, including my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Leicestershire (Mr Bedford). Many civil servants will have worked on this Bill and pensions experts will have contributed, and I thank them all for their hard work and expertise. May I also finally offer congratulations to the current Pensions Minister, the lucky one who gets to be here to see this Bill off to the other place?
We on the Conservative Benches do not agree with all of the Bill, but there is a lot in it that we do welcome, particularly the parts that the Minister inherited from us, including the consolidation of fragmented pension pots, the introduction of the value for money framework and the pensions dashboard. Those will help people to manage their pension savings and get better returns. We also welcome the Government’s amendment of the Bill, reflecting our new clause, to index pre-1997 pensions, for which there was significant consensus across the House. That will provide some dignity for pensioners who have seen their pensions eroded over the years, and we hope that the Government continue to work with campaign groups to see that through. I also thank my right hon. Friends the Members for Herne Bay and Sandwich (Sir Roger Gale) and for Hereford and South Herefordshire (Jesse Norman) for their representations on that.
The Bill also has some serious flaws. Nestled within the sensible reforms that the Government inherited is a power that no Government should wield: the power to mandate how pension funds invest. Today, the job of a pension fund manager is to make the best possible decisions for their fund members about where to invest. Their sole objective is the interests of those members. That is their legal duty, and mandation would change that, because mandation means the Government will be able to tell pension funds how to invest their assets. We should not for a minute underestimate the significance of that. Ministers have insisted it is merely a backstop and a tool they hope never to use, but a threat made just in case is still a threat, and pension trustees know it. I say to the Pensions Minister that a Minister should always consider the worst thing that someone else might do in their position—in essence, “I am not a bad man, but what might a bad man do?” He might be confident that he would not abuse the power, but what if someone else had it?
Those in the pensions sector do not support this plan. Earlier in the year the Minister told them to “chillax”. He may be intensely relaxed, but I must say to him that he is also intensely wrong. Trustees are the custodians of people’s life savings. They are not there to carry out manifesto pledges or pet projects, and the Minister should not put himself or any future pensions Minister in a position to tell them to do so.
Instead of forcing pension funds to invest in the UK, Ministers should ask why they have not been investing and then do something about that. Our amendment 15 gave them the opportunity to diagnose these problems and resolve them, but, as we have just seen, they voted it down. In any event, they should stop making Britain a worse place in which to do business, ramping up taxes on employment, slapping on red tape, and briefing out bad Budget news for months in advance to kill confidence in every sector of the economy.
As my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (James Wild) said earlier, our other concern with the Bill is the relationship between scale and innovation. We agree with the need for scale, but the Government should avoid blocking the emergence of new entrants and the scaling up of existing smaller players.
Finally, there is the question of pension adequacy. While the Bill should help people to manage their pension savings and boost their returns, it falls short when it comes to tackling the serious problem of people under-saving for later life. Millions of people simply are not saving enough for old age. The Government should be acting now in this regard, rather than delaying the next phase of the pensions review and attacking pension savings at every turn. First they came for pensioners’ winter fuel payments, then they came for self-invested personal pensions, and last week they came for salary sacrifice—and that was not a small tweak. The cap on salary sacrifice will net the Treasury nearly £5 billion of extra tax revenue in 2029-30—money that would otherwise have gone into people’s pensions.
We have made our points, argued our position and put amendments to a vote, so we will not be voting against the Bill on Third Reading. However, I urge the Government to listen to the wise and the many expert words that will be spoken when it is debated in the other place, and to use that opportunity to fix it.
Budget Resolutions
Helen Whately Excerpts(3 weeks ago)
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Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
To govern is to choose, and the Chancellor has chosen. She has chosen spending over saving, higher taxes over welfare reform, and benefits Britain over working Britain. She would rather raise taxes by £26 billion than shave a single penny off the welfare bill. She will make people who work and save pay more for the benefits of millions who do not.
I say that the Chancellor chose, but are these her choices or those of Labour Back Benchers? Just a few months ago, when debating the Government’s personal independence payment reform Bill, those Back Benchers were the ones who stood up and said things like, “I didn’t come here to cut benefits.” They were the ones in and out of meetings with No. 10 while the debate was going on in this Chamber, and they were the ones who forced the Disability Minister to stand up during that debate and announce that there would, in fact, be no savings. The Government’s welfare Bill then became a spending Bill, which Labour Back Benchers all voted for, of course.
The Chancellor could have used the Budget to right that wrong—or could she? The wolves have been circling ever since. This was not a Budget for Britain; it was a Budget for Labour Back Benchers. It was a “save our skin” Budget, but in saving her own skin, the Chancellor is selling the country down the river at a cost of £26 billion to taxpayers and 200,000 jobs, on top of the 150,000 that have already been lost since Labour has been in power and the thousands more that the unemployment rights Bill will destroy.
Yuan Yang
Three quarters of the tax raised by this Budget will go towards building fiscal headroom, doubling it—something that previous Conservative Chancellors never did. Does the hon. Lady welcome the investment in the gilt markets that international investors have now shown, demonstrating their confidence in the UK economy?
Helen Whately
This Budget is simple: taxes are going up on working people to pay for more benefits. That is the story of this Budget.
The Chancellor told the country that she was spending to bring down the cost of living. Really? For whom? Inflation is up, tax is up and wage growth is down. The only group of people who are going to be better off are those on benefits—the 10 million people of working age whose benefits will be uplifted by inflation, the thousands more who will go on to sickness benefits in the year ahead, and the half a million households who will get money from the lifting of the two-child cap. Those households will receive £5,000 more on average by the end of this decade, at a cost of £3 billion to the taxpayer, and some will get much more. A family with five children could get an extra £10,500, while a family with eight children will be able to get an extra £21,000, nearly as much as the annual pay before tax of a full-time worker on the minimum wage.
Labour Members have told us again and again today how Labour is fixing child poverty by giving out that extra money. We all care about children—we all want children to get the best start in life. [Interruption.] Come on. Labour Members are chuntering at me, but they cannot doubt the fact that everyone in this place wants children to get the best start in life. Handing out money might improve the poverty statistics that they like so much to crow about, but it will not solve the problem. Work is the best way out of poverty, and the Government’s handout will make parents less likely to work.
There are couples across the country—couples in work—who are wondering whether they can afford another child. Thanks to this Budget, their taxes are going up, and their incomes may well go down. Thanks to this Budget, some of them will decide to have no more children, or no children at all. That is sad, and it is unfair. Labour Members have been crowing about the Budget, but as my hon. Friend the Member for West Worcestershire (Dame Harriett Baldwin) said earlier, the threshold rises it contains could even drag some working families below the relative poverty line that they like to talk about so much.
Paul Waugh
The hon. Lady refers to the threshold freeze. Why did she vote for seven years of frozen thresholds?
Helen Whately
The sad fact is that the country went through a pandemic and we had to get the country’s finances under control. This Chancellor promised that she would not increase taxes on working people, but that is exactly what she has done. Who can trust her? I know that people out there do not.
If all we heard about this Budget was the speeches of Government Members, we would think something wonderful was going on. I hate to shatter their delusions, but the fact is that people out there are despairing. People have been saying to me, “If all the Government are going to do is take your money in taxes, why work? Why bother?” We are seeing those who can, from successful business people to talented future entrepreneurs, leaving the country. The Government are killing aspiration and growth, and, in fact, savings. The OBR says that household savings will fall as a result of the Budget, from 6% to 2% by 2030. The Budget is an attack on people who are simply doing the right thing: working, saving, trying to pay their way in life and trying to build a better future.
The Government could make different choices. If they were willing to get a grip of the welfare bill and bring it down, they could cut taxes on working people. We have heard from several Ministers, and from the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions himself, that the system needs reform, but their actions say otherwise. Working-age welfare spending is up £40 billion in this Budget. The Timms review’s terms of reference tell us that there are no savings to see here. The Secretary of State will not even say the word “savings”. They say one thing, but do another. It sums them up. After all those promises not to put taxes up on working people, here we are with two Budgets in a row hiking taxes on working people.
It does not have to be this way. We have identified £47 billion of savings from public spending. Of that, £23 billion is welfare savings from doing the right thing, such as stopping giving sickness benefits to people with anxiety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and stopping handing out benefits to foreign nationals. It is not kind or compassionate to trap people on benefits. It is not fair on people who are working to pay the bills, and it is simply not affordable for our country to go on like this.
The Minister likes to chat a lot during debates, and he has said that he stood for office “to stop drawing charts”—[Interruption.] He might like to listen to what he actually said, although he does not like to listen to other people. He said that he stood for office
“to stop drawing charts and start changing them.”
He has certainly achieved that. Inflation is up, unemployment is up, borrowing is up and public spending is up. Perhaps he can tell us which of those he is most proud of.
The Minister, the Chancellor, the Prime Minister and the entire Government will all leave their mark on our country with this Budget. At their last Budget, they dug a hole. With this Budget, they have dug it deeper. Instead of cutting the welfare bill, they are adding to it. Instead of getting people into work, they are putting them on benefits. Instead of backing workers, they are funding stay-at-homers using the hard-earned money of Britain’s taxpayers. That is the choice they have made, and we reject it.
Welfare Spending
Helen Whately Excerpts(1 month, 2 weeks ago)
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Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House regrets the failure of the Government to get people off welfare and into work; believes that reforming the welfare system is a moral mission; and therefore calls on the Government to take urgent action to fix Britain’s welfare system by restricting welfare for non-UK citizens, stopping benefits for those with lower-level mental health conditions, increasing the number of face-to-face assessments, reforming the Motability Scheme so that only those with serious disabilities qualify for a vehicle, and retaining the two-child benefit cap, to get people into employment and build a stronger economy.
All of us surely remember our first job and the moment we got our first paycheque. I was 16, I got paid £40 and I bought myself a pair of shoes. They were nothing fancy, but I remember that feeling. It was the first time I had money in my pocket that I had earned to spend how I pleased. It was a moment of liberation from which there was no going back. Of course, as we get older, it is not so simple. We have more obligations and bills to pay, but the basic fact is the same. Having a job and paying our own way is how we get independence, freedom and agency. We can make our own choices and have a chance to build up our financial security. Not every job takes us on a path paved with gold, but if we are not in work, we do not even have a chance of changing our fortune.
Millions of people up and down the country know what I am talking about. They are the people who get up each morning and go to work, or the people who go to work every evening if they are doing a night shift, while some people are doing both to make ends meet. However, it is not everyone: in fact, it is not a lot of people. Let us look at the numbers. There are 6.5 million people of working age on out-of-work benefits, nearly 1 million young people are not in any form of employment, education or training, and every single day 5,000 people are signing on to long-term sickness benefits with no requirement to work. Those numbers should worry all of us in this place. They are not just statistics; we are talking about people—mums, dads, women in their 50s, young men in their 20s—who are missing out, sat at home rather than at work, and waiting for the handout to drop into their bank account rather than out there putting their shoulder to the wheel.
For every person on benefits and out of work, there are many more who suffer the consequences of worklessness, such as the increasing number of children who are growing up in workless households. More than 1 million children across our country have neither the income nor the culture of work, so worklessness gets passed from one generation to the next, stunting life chances—opportunities, prosperity and longevity—in every sense of the word.
This applies to entire communities: there are large parts of our country where being on benefits is not a rarity, it has become the norm. From our great cities such as Birmingham and Liverpool to historic seaside towns such as Blackpool, around a quarter of the population are in out-of-work benefits. Drop into some of the poorest areas of those cities and you will find communities where the majority of people are on benefits. Think what that means in practice along a street, door after door. And watch out if you are the odd one out actually trying to go to work, as I heard on one of my visits recently. A whole family were yelling at their son, who was trying to break the cycle of worklessness, because his 7 am alarm clock was disturbing their sleep.
As shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, I travel the country talking to people and finding out the facts on the ground. One story that stuck with me is about a young man in his 20s from Bridgend in Wales. He is on benefits, but he got a place on a course at the local college—the exact course he wanted to do. It had the potential to give him skills and transform his life. It could have got him off benefits and into work at the job he really wanted to do, but it did not happen. Why? Because he was terrified of being worse off—that he would lose his personal independence payment and end up broke. That is wrong. And let us be frank: his story is not a one-off. It is going on all around the country. Everywhere, every day, people are deciding they are better off on benefits.
Our welfare system should be a safety net but it has become a welfare trap, condemning people to live off the state rather than off their elbow grease. Of course, help should be there for people who are unable to work or who need a lot of support to do so. In fact, if the system worked better, it might be able to help some people—those who really need it—more. Instead, we have many thousands of people making rational decisions to claim benefits rather than work, the benefits bill rocketing, and still people who are disabled facing a struggle to get help and make ends meet.
Sarah Smith (Hyndburn) (Lab)
Does the hon. Lady not recognise that personal independence payment is not a benefit paid on your ability to work—it is paid regardless—so providing that case study is perhaps not the most appropriate to making the argument she is trying progress?
Helen Whately
Of course I know that, but if the hon. Lady had talked to as many people who receive PIP as I have, she would know that many people worry that if they go into training or work, they will then, when they are reassessed, lose their PIP. Even though in theory, yes, you can work if you can while you are getting PIP, people worry that because they are working it will be then be seen as them not actually needing it and that they do not actually have that level of health problem. That is why at the moment it is acting, in the way in works, as a barrier and a disincentive to work, and that is why it needs reform.
Reforming welfare is not cruel to people on benefits—quite the opposite. What is cruel is ducking the challenge, accepting the status quo and continuing to spend millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on keeping people on benefits, but that is exactly what the Labour party is doing. Just a few months ago, the Prime Minister and the former Work and Pensions Secretary did have a go at doing something about it. They set out some welfare cuts—rushed and poorly thought-through, as I said at the time—but their Back Benchers were having none of it. We have never seen anything like it. It was the very definition of shambles in this Chamber. Right in the middle of the debate, their savings Bill became a spending Bill, with the Government frantically making concessions that we still live with, such as the Timms review into PIP.
I have a great deal of respect for the Minister for Social Security and Disability, the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms), but what hope can we have for his review when it was conceived as a bargaining chip to buy off angry Back Benchers? It has taken months to even kick off the review and months to come up with the terms of reference. Now we have them, we see that welfare savings are off the table. And yes, I said “savings”, a word the Secretary of State was careful to steer clear of in questions last week. What a situation this is.
The Chancellor keeps talking about welfare savings; she did so again this morning. However, the review by the Minister for Social Security and Disability ruled out making any savings. The Secretary of State will not even utter the word. Who will win this argument? Will it be the hapless Chancellor with her back against the wall or the wily Welfare Secretary playing a longer game?
While Ministers spar behind the political scenes, the clock is ticking and the benefits bill keeps heading up and up towards £100 billion, with no prospect of the Government slowing that trajectory, let alone actually getting it down. Instead, as the Chancellor as good as told us this morning, the Government will turn to tax rises to fund welfare and more job-destroying, growth-killing policies, reducing opportunities and saddling future generations with the bill, leaving them to pay it off for decades to come. The Government have not only given up on saving money; they have given up on millions of people across Britain.
Oliver Ryan (Burnley) (Lab/Co-op)
On savings and leaving the next generation with a bill, can the hon. Lady remind the House just how much the now shadow Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Central Devon (Sir Mel Stride), increased Department for Work and Pensions spending on welfare during his time in the Department? The figure I have on the tip of my tongue is somewhere north of £30 billion. Could she comment on that?
Helen Whately
The hon. Gentleman thinks he is so clever, but I am sorry to say this is a whole lot more serious than that. [Interruption.] I am glad Labour Members liked that. The fact is, if the hon. Gentleman looked a little further than his time in politics, back to 2010, he would know that the welfare bill and unemployment figures came down, and that we had the huge reform of universal credit, led by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith), which made a huge difference. [Interruption.] As has been chuntered by those on the Government Front Bench, yes, of course, the pandemic made a difference. We had a set of reforms going on, and then those on the Front Bench and some of their predecessors—there has been a certain amount of turnover—came in and gave up on those reforms. Where are we now? There are no savings and no plans to get people off welfare and into work.
However, it does not have to be this way. The country knows that this is not working, and people want change. They want a fairer system: one where people who do the right thing are rewarded; where work does pay; where people taking personal responsibility for themselves and their family makes sense; where there is help for those who need it, but not for just anyone who might fancy it; and where welfare is a safety net, not a way of life. It might be hard for Members on the Government Benches to hear, but this is what people out there want. They want it now—let us get on with it.
The Conservatives have set out our common-sense proposals to start fixing the welfare system. We would stop sickness benefits for people with lower-level mental health conditions like anxiety and reform Motability, putting an end to taxpayer-funded cars for people who have conditions like ADHD and tennis elbow. We would bring back face-to-face assessments, which are going down under this Labour Government, and change the sick note system so that it does not just funnel people out of the office and on to benefits. We would prioritise Brits in our welfare system, stopping people with indefinite and limited leave to remain claiming benefits. Of course, we also believe in retaining the two-child benefit cap, because it is fiscally responsible and fair. Removing the cap would cost more than £3 billion and would be deeply unfair on families who are not on benefits—the couples who decide they cannot afford another child, but would pay taxes for someone else to do just that. The Conservatives are the only party fully committed to the two-child benefit cap—no ifs, no buts.
The Minister for Social Security and Disability (Sir Stephen Timms)
I have read somewhere that the list of things the hon. Lady has gone through would, the Conservatives estimate, save £23 billion. Part of that is from housing benefit. Can she tell us how much of the £23 billion would be saved from housing benefit?
Helen Whately
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that question. As he says, we have earmarked potential savings of £23 billion, and housing benefit is one area. There is the other set of savings that I have just gone through. I am very happy to go through some of our sums and how we have got to those figures with him. As I have said to him, I believe that this Government should be picking up on our suggestions, because that is how they could bring down the welfare bill and avoid what we saw the Chancellor clearly rolling the pitch for this morning: tax rises at the Budget.
Times are hard. I do not want the Government to put up taxes. I do not want them to keep spending other people’s money on welfare, because we all know that one day it will run out. I do not want them to keep people living a life on benefits rather than being in work. That is why I have been so clear about what they could and should do.
I have heard Labour Back Benchers say in this Chamber, “I didn’t come here to cut benefits”, and that is why we have offered to help. The Leader of the Opposition, the shadow Chancellor and I have made a big offer to the Government. We will help them make welfare savings, and we will work with them in good faith to get the welfare bill down and get people off welfare and into work. Labour Back Benchers do not want to make the tough decisions on welfare, but our door is open. We will work with the Government in the national interest. It is not too late to make those bold decisions and make serious savings. A vote for our motion is a vote to get Britain’s welfare system back on track, to get the welfare bill under control, and to set out on a moral mission to get millions off welfare and into work.
Oral Answers to Questions
Helen Whately Excerpts(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
I welcome the Secretary of State to his new job and wish him luck in it—especially because, with every day that passes under this Government, we see fewer people enjoying the chance to start a new job. Unemployment has gone up month after month. Nearly 1 million young people are not in education, employment or training because of this Government’s policies, jobs tax and business red tape; even the Pensions Minister’s former think-tank agrees with me. People all around the country are out looking for work—young people who want to get on in life and all those trying to provide for their families—so can the Secretary of State tell us and them when he will get unemployment down?
Pat McFadden
The hon. Lady has a short memory. The Government in which she served presided over the biggest slowdown in living standards in recent memory, and there are 358,000 more people in work now than there were at the start of the year. We will keep supporting young people into work and will change the system that we inherited, which had the wrong incentives and a lack of support. We are putting both of those things to rights.
Helen Whately
No surprises there, Mr Speaker; the Prime Minister can put new faces on the Front Bench, but they still do not have the answers. The right hon. Gentleman criticised the previous Conservative Government, but we got unemployment down to a 40-year low—a record Labour could only dream of. The Government do not want to be held to account. Worse still, the right hon. Gentleman knows that what he is doing will not work, because the country is looking down the barrel of more tax rises in next month’s Budget, which will kill yet more jobs and opportunities. Whether it is graduates looking for their first job or older people being made redundant, people are crying out for a Government who are on their side. What will it take to get the Chancellor to understand that it is businesses that create jobs, not the Government, and does the right hon. Gentleman not agree that the more the Chancellor damages the economy, the bigger the welfare bill will get?
Pat McFadden
Since we came into office, interest rates have been cut five times, helping businesses and households. According to Lloyds, business confidence is at a nine-year high, and there is to be much more private investment, including the £150 billion announced during the recent state visit. Add to that the trade deals that the Conservatives could not secure—there are reasons to be optimistic about the future of the economy and I hope the hon. Lady shares them.
Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
Indeed, questions are to be answered by the Government on this occasion.
The right hon. Gentleman has an important and not always easy job. I am sure that we all remember the fiasco before the summer when the Government tried to make welfare savings and ended up legislating for welfare spending. Since then, the Prime Minister has said that there is a “clear moral case” for welfare cuts, and the Chancellor has said that she “can’t leave welfare untouched”. Does the Secretary of State agree?
Pat McFadden
I notice that the hon. Lady did not want to clarify the position on means-testing the state pension. Welfare reform is happening all the time. We passed important changes to the universal credit system that were voted through by the House and, as I said, we are putting in place important employment support to help not only long-term sick and disabled people but young people into work through many of the policies that I have talked about today.
Helen Whately
I cannot help but notice that the Secretary of State continues to attempt to deflect from his job of answering the questions. The fact is, we just heard that he will not commit to making the welfare savings that his Prime Minister and his Chancellor have said they need to make. I thought the Prime Minister was meant to be in charge.
Getting people off welfare and into work not only saves money; it is morally wrong to condemn people to a life on benefits. Without welfare reform, this country is stuck on Labour’s broken record of higher taxes and lower growth. We have even offered to help the Secretary of State, so why will he not commit to making welfare savings?
Pat McFadden
We inherited a situation that had 3 million people inactive and almost 1 million people not in employment, education or training. We are putting in place critical employment support to help long-term sick and disabled people into work, we have changed the incentives through legislation on the universal credit system, and we are increasing the number of face-to-face checks in the system, which fell on the Conservatives’ watch. What do people think it fell by? Do we think it fell by 10%? Do we think it fell by 30%? No, it fell by 90% under the system over which the hon. Lady’s Government presided.
Oral Answers to Questions
Helen Whately Excerpts(3 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Speaker. It is good to see you back after the summer recess.
The hon. Lady can fling around the stats all she likes, but the facts are clear and bleak. Under her watch, youth unemployment has gone up; nearly a million young people, and rising, are not in work or education, including over 40,000 more young women. A generation of brilliant young people are going on to benefits, rather than into work. The Government’s jobs tax and their unemployment rights Bill were guaranteed to reduce opportunities for young people. We have had the winter fuel U-turn and the welfare U-turn; why not a U-turn to help young people?
Alison McGovern
The damage was done to the coming generation under the Tories. We failed the pandemic generation, who put a shift in—they stayed at home and gave up their social lives to save older loved ones. I could talk at length about our youth guarantee, our trailblazers and the work we are doing to expand youth hubs, but actually, it sticks in my craw to hear the Conservatives, who failed this generation, harp on about it from that Dispatch Box.
Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
I welcome the right hon. Lady back after the summer. She said recently that it had been “a bumpy…few months”—an understatement, in my view. Last time we stood here, she had just completed a rather humiliating climbdown on her welfare savings plans. She set out to save money, but ended up spending it. You couldn’t make it up, Mr Speaker, but here we are: the number of benefit claimants has hit a record high; the sickness benefit bill is heading up and up; and still the right hon. Lady has Back Benchers and Cabinet colleagues calling for even more spending on welfare. The Chancellor is busy doing her sums in advance of the Budget, so can the right hon. Lady tell us how much lifting the two-child benefits cap will cost?
Liz Kendall
I am not often called understated, but I thank the hon. Lady for her comments.
Welfare reform is always difficult because it involves real people and real lives, and it is a complicated and personal issue. However, we are investing £3.8 billion in employment support to help sick and disabled people into work, we are introducing the first ever right to try work, and we are dealing fundamentally with the perverse incentive left by the Conservative party which encouraged people to define themselves as incapable of work. We are addressing that by raising the standard allowance of universal credit and halving the health top-up for new claims. There is much more that we need to do, and we will be publishing our strategy to deal with child poverty in the autumn, but I am proud to say that the last Labour Government lifted 600,000 children out of poverty, while the hon. Lady’s party plunged 900,000 children into poverty. We will take action, and, as I said earlier, the hon. Lady should watch this space.
Helen Whately
I asked the right hon. Lady a simple question, but I fear that she does not know the answer; she certainly did not reply to it. What is clear is that Labour wants to spend more on welfare. So do the Liberal Democrats, and so does Reform. Only one party here is telling the truth about the welfare bill: the country cannot afford it.
May I urge the right hon. Lady to take up my proposals? Will she stop giving people benefits for common mental health problems such as anxiety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and give them help instead? Will she stop giving personal independence payments to foreign citizens who have not paid into our system and free cars to people who do not need them? Will she stop people scamming the benefits system over the phone and on the internet? Will she keep the two-child benefits cap, and get the benefits bill under control?
Mr Speaker
Order. Can I just say that we are on topicals? It is your own Members who are not going to get in.
Welfare Spending
Helen Whately Excerpts(5 months ago)
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Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House believes the two-child benefit cap should remain in place and that households with a third or subsequent child born from 6 April 2017 claiming Universal Credit or Child Tax Credit should not receive additional funding, because those who receive benefits should make the same decisions about having children as those who do not; further believes that lifting the cap would exacerbate a benefits culture which is unfair on the taxpayers who pay for it and unfair on those who become trapped on benefits, because those who can work, should work; and generally supports further changes to reduce welfare spending and ensure that benefits are there only for those who need them.
All of us have to make difficult choices in life about what we can afford. Many of us here are fortunate, but one of those choices will have been the number of children we have. We may wish that such an important decision were not tainted by something as unromantic as money, but that is the hard fact of the matter. Children are wonderful—I say that as the mum of three teenagers—but bringing them up is an expensive business. As Conservatives we believe in the importance of family, in personal responsibility, in fairness, and as families and as a society, in living within our means. That is why today we are calling on all Members to affirm our commitment to a policy that reflects those principles.
Let me take a step back for a moment and reflect on the situation we are in as a country. We have 28 million people in Britain who are now working to pay the wages, benefits and pensions of 28 million others. More than half of all households received more in benefits and benefits in kind than they have paid in taxes. To spell that out, more people are net recipients than net contributors. That is happening right now, and with every day that passes, spending on benefits is going up and up. Health and disability benefits alone are set to hit £100 billion by the end of the decade. That is more than we spend on defence, on education and on policing.
While it might seem kind to spend more on welfare, it is not. It is not kind to those trapped in the welfare system and written off to a lifetime on benefits. As we embark on a doom loop of uncontrolled spending, higher taxes, struggling businesses, entrepreneurial exodus, rising unemployment and then more people out of work and on benefits, it is not kind to those who lose their jobs and their incomes in that cycle of misery. If the moment comes when we cannot afford to provide welfare even to those in desperate need, it most definitely will not be kind to them, the very people our welfare safety net is meant to be there for.
Dave Doogan (Angus and Perthshire Glens) (SNP)
The shadow Minister talks about kindness. Does she agree, therefore, with the Children’s Commissioner for England, who has said that children in England are now living in “Dickensian levels” of poverty? A principal element of that is the two-child cap. What element of kindness does the shadow Minister see present in that unfairness?
Helen Whately
I do not agree with the hon. Member. I am going to talk about poverty in a moment, so if he will just hold on, he will hear my view on that point.
This is a ticking time bomb. If we do not solve this problem, our economy will collapse, yet opposite me sit members of this Labour Government who have just shown us, with the welfare chaos over the past couple of weeks, that they will not, and indeed cannot, fix this. In fact, they are just making it worse.
If hon. Members cast their minds back to early 2020, they will remember that Labour was in the midst of a leadership election. The now Prime Minister made a clear and unequivocal commitment to
“scrap…punitive sanctions, two-child limit and benefits cap.”
Then, once he had secured the leadership of the Labour party and the election neared, he changed that tune. He said Labour was not going to abolish the two-child limit. He acknowledged the need to take tough decisions and not to make unfunded spending promises, and on this we can agree. But saying that he would take tough decisions is not the same as actually taking them.
Take for example the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill, now just called the Universal Credit Bill, which Labour voted through last week. It was meant to save £5 billion. The first U-turn brought that down to £2 billion, and the next U-turn then brought it down to—well, the Minister on the Front Bench at the time could not tell us, but the consensus is that it will now cost the taxpayer around £100 million.
Dame Harriett Baldwin (West Worcestershire) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making a powerful speech. Does she agree that, as a result of that Bill, one of the things that is most shocking is that in due course it will actually pay someone more to be on welfare than to work full time on the minimum wage?
Helen Whately
My hon. Friend makes an important point about the problem of a welfare trap, where people would better be better off on benefits than working full time on the minimum wage.
Helen Whately
I will first make a little progress, but then I will be happy to give way to the hon. Lady.
Last week’s welfare fiasco saw a Bill that was meant to save money become a Bill that will cost money. We have also seen the fiasco of the winter fuel payments cut, with the Government having to row back on their tough talk because taking money from low-income pensioners is not, in fact, the way to make savings. And now we are debating the future of the two-child limit, which Cabinet Ministers, including the Prime Minister, have indicated is the next tough choice that they are not going to make.
Dame Caroline Dinenage (Gosport) (Con)
My hon. Friend talks about tough choices. Does she agree that families that are in work make tough choices every single day, about what they can afford and how they spend their money, and that those who receive benefits should really have to make the same tough choices?
Helen Whately
My hon. Friend makes an important and thoughtful point. Many families, whether they are living off benefits or in work, would like to have more children but have to make these difficult choices about what they can afford. This is a point about fairness.
I know that many Labour Members passionately believe that the limit should go, and they will make arguments today about child poverty as if they were the only ones who care about it—[Interruption.] For the avoidance of doubt, that is not true. Our difference of opinion is about what to do about it. I think all of us are at a loss to know what the Prime Minister believes in. By contrast, we know what we believe in and we know why we are here. That is why we have brought forward this debate on the two-child limit, because somebody has to make the case for fiscal responsibility, for living within our means, for fairness, for ensuring that work pays and for keeping the two-child cap.
I want to be clear that all of us—including those of us on the Opposition Benches—want children to have the best possible start in life. Let us also be clear about what the two-child limit actually is, because I note that some Members from other parties are confused. The two-child limit restricts the amount of additional universal credit that families receive for having children to the first two children only, with some sensible exceptions, such as for twins or non-consensual conception. The cap does not apply to child benefit, which is available to all families with incomes of up to £80,000 for every child, regardless of the number of children in a family.
Sir John Hayes (South Holland and The Deepings) (Con)
I am proud to be a member of the party of Wilberforce, Shaftesbury and Disraeli, who all understood that it is essential to free people from need, and that in that effort the state can be a force for good. But in freeing people from need we should not limit them to a life of dependency. It is entirely possible to believe that although welfare can be a force for good, so too can personal responsibility, and responsibility means making the kinds of choices that my hon. Friend has set out.
Helen Whately
I could not put it better than my right hon. Friend.
We know that bringing up children is expensive and important. When working couples have to make tough decisions about whether they can afford to start a family in the first place, they should not be made to pay more in taxes to fund their neighbour to have a third, fourth or fifth child. Someone in a job does not get paid more just because they have another child. If we are worried about people getting caught in a benefits trap where it pays more to be on welfare than in work, how much worse would it be with neither the two-child benefit nor the benefits cap? It would mean benefits increased by thousands. When I say thousands, the House of Commons Library has told me that a family with five children would get more than £10,000 extra a year and a family with eight children would get more than £20,000 extra a year. That is more than the after-tax income of someone working full time on the minimum wage.
Deirdre Costigan
Does the hon. Member seriously believe that any family anywhere in the country will take seriously the Conservative party lecturing them on personal and fiscal responsibility, when this is the party that not only brought the economy to its knees through the uncosted promises of Liz Truss’s Government, but partied in the back garden of No. 10 when the rest of us were under covid restrictions?
Helen Whately
If I could take the hon. Lady back a bit, she might remember when we came into office in 2010, and we had to bring down the deficit year after year to get the country’s finances under control.
Giving children the best start in life is not as simple as handing out more money. It is about giving parents the community support they need as they encounter the challenges of bringing up a child, which is why we launched the family hubs. It is about education, but school teachers around the country are being let go. It is about growing up in a household with someone in work, but across the country people are being made redundant because of the Chancellor’s jobs tax.
I know that I will not win over everyone here with my argument. For instance, I do not expect to convince the four remaining Reform MPs, because their leader has said that he would remove the two-child limit—the hon. Member for Clacton (Nigel Farage) believes that is the right thing to do and said that he is not finished yet on benefit giveaways. But asking the taxpayer for ever more in taxes to pay for their neighbour’s benefits is not the right thing to do. The country, taxpayers and future generations cannot afford this. The Prime Minister, the Chancellor and Cabinet Ministers have been unable to rule out more tax rises this autumn. Businesses, working people, pensioners, savers, homeowners—whose pocket will be picked next?
Last week, the Office for Budget Responsibility warned that the UK’s finances are in a very “vulnerable position”. Now more than ever we need the Government to take the tough decisions—but will they? I know Labour Back Benchers are itching to vote to scrap the limit, but where are the Government on this? Will they take the position of the Prime Minister in 2020, in 2024 or now, or will they have to abstain because the Government just do not know? Soon we will see.
Only the Conservatives understand the importance of personal responsibility, fairness and living within our means. Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP, the Greens and Reform all voted last week for more welfare spending. Will they do the same today, or will they vote with us to back the people getting up every morning, going out to work, doing the hard yards, making the hard choices and working hard to build our country?
Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill
Helen Whately ExcerptsTuesday 1st July 2025
(5 months, 2 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Universal Credit Act 2025 View all Universal Credit Act 2025 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
This has been an extraordinary afternoon in the Chamber. Listening to the debate, we have surely all been moved by the stories we have heard of the experiences of hon. Members, of the experiences of their families, loved ones and constituents, and of how the welfare system has served its vital purpose of providing a safety net in times of desperate need, particularly for people whose disabilities or ill health have made it impossible for them to make ends meet on their own. It is clear that there is broad consensus across the House that the welfare system needs reform. There has also been consensus that what we were debating was a bad Bill. It was a rushed and chaotic compromise that would harm disabled people, create a two-tier benefit system, and barely make a dent in the overall welfare bill. How could anyone justify voting for something that would not make a single disabled person’s life better? It is clear that many, many Members could not.
I said that it “was” a bad Bill, because while we have been debating it, it has more or less disintegrated. Less than two hours ago, the Minister for Social Security and Disability told us, in an unprecedented intervention, that clause 5 of the Bill is to be removed in Committee. That takes out all the changes to personal independence payment, and with them almost the entirety of the remaining savings in the Bill. Describing it as chaos now feels like an understatement.
We have a Government with a supermajority who were voted in on a manifesto for change, a welfare system that everyone agrees needs reform, and public finances that simply must be brought under control, but the Government are now serving up a Bill with next to nothing in it. They had already U-turned once; it seems they cannot even deliver a U-turn. The Prime Minister told the country that he was distracted at NATO, and he flew back home on Thursday to sort the problem out. This is what sorting it out looks like. Once again, his calamitous negotiations are letting the country down.
Last week, we offered the Prime Minister help in the national interest and set out three tests that he would need to meet to have our support on welfare legislation. The first was that the welfare bill must come down. We all know people whose lives would not be possible without the help that our welfare system provides. Each and every one of us in the Chamber wants a welfare system that is there for those who need it, but if the welfare bill spirals out of control, it puts that support in jeopardy. The Bill now makes no meaningful changes to a system that we all agree is not working, and I reckon it will now save less than £1 billion from a sickness benefits bill that will be rising to nearly £100 billion by the end of the decade. That is a total dereliction of duty by a Government who claim to want welfare reform and fiscal discipline.
Secondly, we said that we would support plans that get people into work, but the Bill will not help a single person into work. Ministers said, “Trust us, employment support is coming,” but why would anyone trust this Government on jobs when 100,000 were lost in May alone? None of us have seen the Government’s plan to get more disabled people into work, and apart from new red tape and making it more expensive to hire people, I do not think there is one. Thirdly, we said that we must not have more tax rises in the autumn. Given that the Chancellor had already committed to that, it should have been the simplest of those three conditions to agree to, but this desperate climbdown blows an even bigger hole in her Budget. She is pushing us into a doom loop of higher taxes, fewer jobs and more welfare. At this rate, the time is coming when our constituents will not even have a welfare system to call on in times of trouble.
What is left for us to vote for or against this evening? All of us in this House know that welfare needs reform and want to see more people helped into work. All of us in this House—surely most of us, at least—recognise that the country must live within its means. The remnants of this Bill will manifestly achieve none of that. In fact, the only purpose it will now serve is to etch forever into the statute book the moment when this Government totally lost control.
Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. In the light of the shambles this afternoon, with the Bill being ripped apart literally before our eyes in this Chamber and the Minister unable even to tell us how much it will now save, can you please advise me whether it should still be rushed through to be debated next week in Committee of the whole House, or whether the Government should in fact withdraw it?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
The hon. Member has put her point on the record. She has been a Minister in the past and so will know that the scheduling of business is a matter for the Government, and not for the Chair.
Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill (Programme)
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 83A(7),
That the following provisions shall apply to the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill:
Committal
(1) The Bill shall be committed to a Committee of the whole House.
Proceedings in Committee, on Consideration and on Third Reading
(2) Proceedings in Committee shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion one hour before the moment of interruption on the day on which those proceedings are commenced.
(3) Any proceedings on Consideration and proceedings on Third Reading shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion at the moment of interruption on the day on which proceedings in Committee of the whole House are commenced.
Programming committee
(4) Standing Order No. 83B (Programming committees) shall not apply to proceedings in Committee of the whole House, to any proceedings on Consideration or to proceedings on Third Reading.—(Chris Elmore.)
Question agreed to.
Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill (Money)
King’s recommendation signified.
Motion made, and Question put forthwith (Standing Order No. 52(1)(a)),
That, for the purposes of any Act resulting from the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill, it is expedient to authorise the payment out of money provided by Parliament of:
(a) any increase in the administrative expenses of the Secretary of State that is attributable to the Act;
(b) any increase in sums payable by virtue of any other Act out of money so provided that is attributable to increasing—
(i) the standard allowance or limited capability for work and work-related activity element of universal credit;
(ii) the personal allowance, support component, severe disability premium or enhanced disability premium of income-related employment and support allowance.—(Chris Elmore.)
Question agreed to.
Welfare Reform
Helen Whately Excerpts(5 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
I thank the right hon. Lady for advance sight of her statement.
This is a Government in chaos: open rebellion from their own Back Benchers, unfunded U-turns costing billions, and welfare plans that are not worth the paper they are written on. Their latest idea is a two-tier welfare system to trap people in a lifetime on benefits and deny them the dignity of work, while leaving the taxpayer to pick up the ever-growing bill.
It is a long-held Conservative belief that those who can work, should work. Work provides security and purpose. That is why we launched universal credit, simplifying complex benefits and ensuring that work always paid. And it works. In the decade up to the pandemic, we got the number of people on benefits and the benefits bill itself down. Some 800 jobs were created for every day that we were in office, giving millions of people the dignity and security that work brings.
But then, during the pandemic, we saw something new. The health and disability bit of our benefits system started to break. The bill is forecast to hit £100 billion by 2030. One in every four pounds of income tax will be spent on health and disability benefits—more than the entire defence budget. That is not fair for the taxpayer, not fair for people who are written off, and certainly not sustainable for the country.
Despite Labour having 14 years in opposition and now a year in government, they still do not have a plan to bring down the welfare bill or get people into work. What we have before us now is a rushed and chaotic compromise that is not reform in any sense of the word. It is woefully unambitious about savings, conspicuously lacking in compassion and achieves no meaningful change of a system we all know is broken. Thanks to the Government’s latest climbdown, we are left with a plan that will save just £2.5 billion of a £100 billion bill by introducing a two-tier system. Two people diagnosed with Parkinson’s a week apart will now receive different levels of support—all to clear up an internal Labour argument. The Government’s own impact assessment shows that these plans will not get a single person into work. The idea that work is the guiding motivation for these changes is laughable.
There are things that the Government could do. They could reform the fit note system, which sees 94% of people who apply told that they are too sick to do any work at all. They could say today that they would make all sickness benefit assessments face to face. They could get a grip of the rising claims for common mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression. Claims for those and neurodevelopmental conditions such as ADHD are the main reason for the steep rise in the number of people on sickness benefits, making up more than half of all new claims. The Centre for Social Justice has found that the Government could save up to £9 billion by reforming those benefits. However, nothing that we have seen from Labour over the past couple of weeks suggests that it has the courage and conviction to grip that problem. In the meantime, our welfare bill will only continue to rise.
We agree on the need for reform and have set out the conditions under which we would support the Government: first, the welfare budget must come down; secondly, we need to get people back into work; thirdly, there must be no new tax rises to pay for increases in welfare spending. But with the welfare bill ever growing, unemployment rising and jobs disappearing, the Bill fails on all accounts.
Will the Secretary of State confirm whether the changes she is announcing today will be paid for through borrowing or taxation? Where are these good jobs she claims to be creating, when vacancies are going down and unemployment is going up? Has she read the impact assessment for the Government’s Employment Rights Bill, which makes it clear that it will be harder for people to find work as a result? Why did it take the Government a year to publish the terms of reference for their PIP assessment review, and when can we expect changes if it does not report back until autumn 2026? Could I try one more time to ask what the difference is between the Secretary of State’s right to try guarantee and our chance to work guarantee?
Finally, is this it? Are there any more savings? Are the Government not going to get any more people into work? Is this the extent of their ambition for reforming the welfare system during their time in office? In five years’ time, will this be the Secretary of State’s legacy?
Liz Kendall
I am in listening mode, and I listened carefully to what the hon. Lady said: once again, her strategy seems to be to rail against the problems that she and her party created. She has some chutzpah to talk about a two-tier system, when that is precisely what the Conservatives introduced when they protected people on legacy benefits when they moved on to UC and replaced DLA with PIP. They were part of that, and the hon. Lady should admit that rather than making those points. She said we should bring back face-to-face reassessments. We are doing so—it was the Conservatives who switched them off.
To be honest, I am still no clearer about what the Conservatives’ policy actually is. The hon. Lady and the shadow Chancellor, the right hon. Member for Central Devon (Sir Mel Stride), claim that they had a plan to cut £12 billion from the welfare bill in their manifesto, but the truth is that it was nothing but a vague idea about turning PIP into vouchers. She talks about fit notes—I think the Conservatives tried to reform them about three or four times but completely failed, as have all their other efforts. The one change the Conservatives did propose was to the work capability assessment, and their consultation was ruled illegal by the courts.
What is beyond doubt is the mess that they left our welfare state and country in. Economic inactivity was rising; it is coming down under Labour. Disability benefits were doubling, with the cost to taxpayers soaring. We are putting in place real reforms based on our values—fair for those who need support and for taxpayers. That is the leadership that this country deserves.
Oral Answers to Questions
Helen Whately Excerpts(5 months, 3 weeks ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
I call the shadow Secretary of State.
Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
Two weeks ago, the hon. Gentleman’s Government told people they were U-turning on winter fuel payments because the economy is on a “firmer footing”. The next day, the unemployment figures were released, showing that a quarter of a million jobs have been lost since the Chancellor’s job-taxing Budget. The country is now losing 100,000 jobs a month. These figures are worse than even the most pessimistic forecast. Is that what a firm footing looks like to the hon. Gentleman?
Torsten Bell
A firm footing for economic recovery looks like kicking the Conservative party out of office and growing the economy once again, and that is what we see if we look at the data. The hon. Lady likes to look at one month’s data—well, let us look at it. Data from the Office for National Statistics show that vacancies rose by 27% between April and May. I know the Conservatives want to pretend that everything was wonderful a year ago, but every business and every voter in this country knows that that was not the case.
Helen Whately
Honestly, who does the Minister think he is fooling with this spiel? Growth forecasts have been slashed and inflation has surged. What world is he living in? The Government have been in office for a year and people are losing their jobs because of the decisions that they have made. How does he think his “everything’s fine” mantra actually sounds to one of the people who have lost their jobs or to a business facing a tax bill that it cannot afford? Has the Secretary of State even told her Back Benchers, who will be strong-armed into voting for cuts next week, that the welfare cuts Bill that we will be debating will get a grand total of zero people into work, according to the Government’s own impact assessment?
Torsten Bell
The hon. Lady asks about what is going on with the economy. What is going on is that we have had four rate cuts over the past year. What is going on is that we have signed three trade deals over the past year. What is going on is that employment has gone up and inactivity has gone down. I know that the Opposition love to latch on to one month’s data, but let us look at the whole period of this Government: wages have increased by more under this party in the past 10 months than they did in the first 10 years of the Conservative Government.
Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)
More than half of new health and disability benefits claims are now for mental health, yet under the Government’s welfare cuts Bill the personal independence payment could be stripped from three quarters of claimants with arthritis and two thirds of those with heart disease but fewer than half of those with anxiety. Does the right hon. Lady believe this is the right decision?
Liz Kendall
I have great personal respect for the hon. Lady but she really needs to make up her mind: first she says our proposals are too late, then she says they are rushed; she criticises us for being cruel, and then says the Opposition are going to vote against our Bill because it does not go far enough. But her deputy, the hon. Member for East Wiltshire (Danny Kruger), has let the cat out of the bag, saying in a recent Westminster Hall debate:
“I am not able to tell…exactly what we would do.”—[Official Report, 7 May 2025; Vol. 766, c. 301WH.]
The truth is that the Conservatives are a broken party with no ideas, let alone a strategy—and, unless they change course, they have no future either.
Helen Whately
Goodness me; I asked the right hon. Lady quite a serious question, so that was a very disappointing answer. However, she and I are in agreement that the benefits bill needs to come down, and that will need real reform of the system, so why is she pressing ahead in a panic with her half-baked cuts rather than doing the job properly? We would support a proper rethink of which conditions should get what help, and a better system for people struggling with mental health or neurodiversity, who would be better off in work than parked on benefits. Why did not she make that part of her plan?
Liz Kendall
Let me tell the hon. Lady what we are doing to improve mental health support for people in this country and to make sure that it is treated with equal importance to physical health: we have made significant progress towards recruiting the additional 8,500 mental health workers we said we would recruit in our manifesto to reduce delays and provide support; we have confirmed funding to help an extra 380,000 patients get access to talking therapies; and we are investing the biggest ever amount in employment support for sick and disabled people. I say to the hon. Lady, who left 2.8 million people out of work due to long-term sickness and 1 million young people not in education, employment or training, that it is about time she apologised to the country and made up her mind about whether she will back our reforms.