Universal Credit, Personal Independence Payment, Jobseeker’s Allowance and Employment and Support Allowance (Decisions and Appeals) (Amendment) Regulations 2026

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lady Maclean of Redditch. I want to take a slightly a bigger picture view to explain why I support the Motion. My greatest fear, as a severely disabled person, is that the overall benefits bill, particularly the cost to the taxpayer of those benefits mentioned in the Motion, becomes so big that the welfare system itself collapses. That would be catastrophic for the most disabled people in our society.

I recently asked the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, what advice the UK Government were giving to the Scottish Government about managing the growing devolved benefits bill in the event of our being at war by 2030, which is what many commentators are saying is likely. In his reply, the noble Lord said that he did not agree with the assumption underlying my question and that while, of course, we must spend more on defence, we must also continue to support those who need that support the most. I say to the Minister, whom I, too, welcome back to her place, that I do not criticise her noble friend for the well-meaning desire underlying his answer, but I also say to her that the current level of benefit spending would not survive contact with the enemy.

One only has to read the fascinating wartime diaries of Chips Channon, edited by my noble friend Lord Blackwater, who is no longer in his place, to realise how much taxes would have to shoot up overnight were we to find ourselves in a wartime situation. It is worth noting that Chips Channon was penning his diaries before the creation of the welfare state and without the crippling backdrop of £3 trillion of national debt and an annual bill of around £130 billion in interest payments. Which one of us could argue that those figures are not astronomical? I do not even know how many noughts there are in a trillion. It is absolutely mind-boggling—so mind-boggling, it might as well be meaningless.

Only, it is not. The situation we have got ourselves into is dire, particularly for disabled people. We fool ourselves if we think that raising taxes in a wartime emergency will be enough; it will not. It will have to be accompanied by an urgent shift of resources to defence—defending our country, of course, but also defending the NHS, the welfare state, national infrastructure and our freedoms. For us to be able to defend them will inevitably involve a recalibration of resources, which is why today’s debate is so important; because right now, not only are we nowhere near being able to fight a war, but we are in denial about the implications for disabled people of our having to do so.

Unless and until we ask ourselves the question as to how we got into this hole—the root cause, as my noble friend has just described it—and how we plan to dig our way out of it, including through appropriate reviews as called for in this Motion, disabled people will remain in grave danger, because it is they who will be most vulnerable to the recalibration of resources that I mentioned.

Yet the answer to that question is, I suggest, relatively simple. Politicians of all persuasions uttered warm words but did not respect disabled people enough to tell them the truth. They implied that the system was too big to fail when, actually, we have allowed it to grow so unsustainably big that it is, I fear, doomed to fail. Indeed, I would argue, in sorrow, in fear and as a stakeholder, that the very viability of the welfare state is threatened by the exponential growth in benefits.

If I respect someone, I level with them. They may not like it, but I will not lie to them just to make my life easier. As we dig ourselves out of this hole, we urgently need to reflect on what respect looks like for disabled people. I suggest that it involves taking a number of practical steps, as well as being straight with them about the scale of the challenge and the fact that there will be casualties of any changes. That is unavoidable, but we can plan now to mitigate the impact on those whose disability means that they depend most on the system. We can take steps to convey respect, build trust and give hope, including combining any recalibration of resources with measures such as ensuring that the existing anti-discrimination legal provisions are upheld and enforced; I will shortly write to the chief executive of the law firm CMS on this very question.

This will also include the Government honouring their manifesto pledge and mandating disability employment and pay gap reporting through the introduction of the equality (race and disability) Bill in this Session. The IoD backs mandatory reporting. The 300-plus signatories to the Disability Employment Charter, the brainchild of Professor Kim Hoque of King’s College London, back it—as does, I am delighted to say, the Business Disability Forum, which today has committed to signing the charter. All that remains is for the Government to do likewise by introducing the Bill in this Session.