Personal Independence Payment: Disabled People

Ian Lavery Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Westminster Hall

[Ian Lavery (Blyth and Ashington) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr Allin-Khan. I give great credit to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) for bringing this subject to the Chamber.

There is not one MP here who was elected to make people poorer—not one. If there is, they should look at themselves in the mirror and feel a million shames. I look at the Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms)—a good friend of mine and a tremendous servant to this House—and I wonder what went wrong. Why, when the rich are getting richer, the very rich are getting even more rich and there are more billionaires and millionaires than ever, are we tapping people for pennies, taking away their livelihoods and making their lives so miserable? My constituency of Blyth and Ashington is in the bottom 10% for social deprivation. I have 10,467 people depending on PIP support just to live. They are not living a life of luxury.

[Imran Hussain]

I forgot to say in my speech that I will vote against these measures if the Government push ahead. Will my hon. Friend do the same?

[Ian Lavery]

I will definitely vote against these measures. I was not elected to make my people poorer, for heaven’s sake, and to reduce support and benefits. There are some decent proposals with regard to getting people back to work, but the threat of a blanket reduction of benefits is scandalous. It is not Labour.

By the way, I will not take any lectures from the Tories, who have said categorically that they would double the amount of money that we are looking to withdraw from the benefits system—probably up to £15 billion. I will definitely be voting against these measures. I am a voice for people who need a voice in this place, and we need to oppose this.

--- Later in debate ---

[Danny Kruger (East Wiltshire) (Con)]

Thank you very much indeed, Dr Allin-Khan, for calling me to speak. It is a pleasure to participate. I acknowledge the powerful speeches made by all Members this afternoon and my deep respect for the right hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott). Nobody speaks with greater sincerity and authority on behalf of people who are marginalised and disadvantaged in our society. I pay tribute to her, to her work and to her contribution today.

I want to say a quick word about the history, as mention has been made of the Conservatives’ time in office. I acknowledge that genuine mistakes were made in the design of the welfare system that we have now. The system is clearly not perfect, but it was very much not perfect before: in 2010 the system was extremely complex, with high rates of benefit dependency. The introduction of universal credit and PIP helped to rationalise and bring greater order to the system, and to reward work rather than welfare. Significant improvements were made in that regard, including improvements in the number of disabled people who were able to work and were supported in work.

In the last year of our time in government, 300,000 more disabled people were in work than in the year before. There was genuine improvement. Nevertheless, not enough support was given to many welfare recipients; that was the consequence of our fiscal inheritance in 2010 but also of choices made by the coalition Government, which fell particularly hard on local authorities and the DWP. I acknowledge that point, which is often made by hon. Members.

Then something else happened, particularly around 2017 or 2018 and even more so after covid. We saw a significant rise in the number of people in receipt of health and disability benefits, including in the higher categories of the universal credit health element. People were stuck on benefits, in many cases indefinitely and forever. What explains the imperative for reform, which the Government are responding to, is that the number of people on the higher rate of UC has increased by a third over the past five years. The PIP budget grew by 50% in the last Parliament alone. The fact is that the benefit bill is unsustainable. However, it is also true that the system can be inhumane and ungenerous.

We have a paradox: a system that is bloated and unsustainable overall, leading to the large budgets we are facing, yet on the frontline, in people’s actual experience, the system is starved in terms of the consequence of the inadequacy of benefits for many people. This is a huge opportunity and an imperative for reform—genuine reform, not just the soundbite. I notice that we do not have any Reform MPs in Westminster Hall for this debate. We genuinely need real reform.

In 2024, the Government I supported had plans to bring in further reforms to the benefit system; we did not have the opportunity to introduce those reforms, thanks to the public. Labour was elected with a huge majority that includes many Members here. To my regret and surprise, after 14 years of complaints about Government welfare reforms, the Labour party entered Government apparently without any plans to change the system.

We have spent eight months waiting for reforms to be introduced, only to get what we have now: a crude and cruel set of cuts, without any reform to the system at all. It is purely in response to what the Chancellor has done to the British economy—induced a fiscal crisis and caused the Treasury to demand of the DWP that swingeing cuts be made to the welfare budget, without any opportunity to reform the system or to reduce demand for welfare. That is, of course, what we should be doing if we want to bring down the bills.

There are also, of course, tax increases, including on employers, making it much harder for people to move from welfare into work, which I will not discuss today, and the removal of vital support from pensioners through the winter fuel payment cut.

[Ian Lavery]

Would the hon. Gentleman care to tell us how much His Majesty’s Opposition propose to cut from the welfare bill?

[Danny Kruger]

The hon. Gentleman will be gratified to know that we are not in government, so it is not for us to come forward with precise plans. At the end of the previous Parliament, we had a manifesto commitment to reduce benefit spending and reform disability benefits and UC. We are now in a position of policy formulation, so I am afraid I am not able to tell him exactly what we would do. My role is to challenge the Government on why they have taken so long to come forward with an absence of meaningful reform plans. Unlike the hon. Gentleman, I want to see benefit spending reduced. I think we spend too much on welfare in this country, but that is because we have social breakdown and poverty. The answer to that is not simply to cut benefits without reforming the system, but to reduce the drivers of poverty.

I recognise many of the problems with PIP, and I understand the imperative for change. Members have powerfully made the case that the system is currently inadequate, particularly for people with fluctuating conditions. We have heard powerful testimony about that in the Work and Pensions Committee—the Chairman and many other members are here. In fact, just this morning we heard powerful evidence from people talking about mental health. People who have a set of very complex, interconnected needs might not reach four points on any one measure, so could lose PIP under the Government’s proposal. I have read evidence from the MS Society that makes the same point: 48% of PIP recipients with MS do not reach four points in any one of the measures, so would be at risk. I am very concerned on behalf of those individuals.

I am also concerned that we do not even know how many such people there are. Members made the point that it took a freedom of information request to get the figure of 1.3 million out of the Government. That is not the figure that was officially released. As the hon. Member for Torbay (Steve Darling) said, we are also unclear about the effect on passported benefits, which is a significant question for the Government to answer. Most of all, we do not know what the Government’s announced assessment review will come forward with, yet we are making the cuts before we understand how the method of assessing eligibility will be reformed.

I implore the Minister to pause the measures set out in the Green Paper. We need a proper review not just of the assessment but of the way the whole system works. We absolutely need to bring down the benefits bill, but we do that by reducing demand for welfare, and many of the levers for that are of course outside the DWP. Nevertheless, we should redesign the system itself because of the many problems I have identified. As Members said, we should do that with claimants, not to them.

People voted for change in 2024, but they are not getting it. The Prime Minister promises more of the same—to go “further and faster” on the course he is already on. I deeply regret what he is doing. I have very great respect for the Minister. Few people have spoken in Parliament with greater authority, conviction and expertise on the subject of welfare in recent times. I have great sympathy with him for having to defend this policy position, which I do not think he would have defended in opposition.

I echo the points made by the hon. Member for York Central (Rachael Maskell) and the right hon. Members for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) and for Hackney North and Stoke Newington. They said that Labour should be better than this, and I agree: we should all be better than this. My party will stand with Members who oppose the changes.