Timms Review: Interim Report

Debate between Peter Bedford and Stephen Timms

Thursday 9th July 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mr Peter Bedford (Mid Leicestershire) (Con)]

I thank the Minister for the advance copy of his statement. I put on record my thanks to the 38,000 people and organisations who took part and responded to the call for evidence.

Let us be honest about how we got here. This review was not born out of principle; it was born out of panic. Last summer, the Government brought forward proposals for £5 billion of welfare savings, but 126 of their own Members rebelled, and within days, Ministers had abandoned the lot. The Timms review is a fig leaf draped over that failure—a review commissioned not to fix the system, but to get the Government through a difficult week.

A year on, what do we have? An interim report. Not a decision, not a reform, but a report about a report, with a promise of full findings in the autumn, and perhaps legislation at some later stage. Meanwhile, the welfare bill keeps rising. Spending on PIP alone is forecast to reach £43 billion a year by the end of this decade. Every month of drift is paid for by working people, and every month of uncertainty is endured by nearly 4 million claimants.

The Opposition accept that the system needs reforming. That is why, last month, we launched the Conservative party’s review of disability and sickness benefits. It is a root-and-branch review of a failing system that will look into who should get help, how they should be assessed, what form that help should take, the conditionality of support and how to control the level of overall spending. It asks a much more fundamental set of questions than this review. It sets out to make savings, as well as to build a better system.

The Government have now had two years, one abandoned Bill and two reviews, but they have not delivered a single lasting reform. The official Opposition’s position is clear. We would restore face-to-face assessments as the default, because decisions of this consequence should not be made down the phone. We believe that people with milder health conditions are better served by treatment and support to get them into work than by being signed off for a lifetime on welfare. We would restrict access to sickness and disability benefits for those without a long-term connection to this country. We would bring the welfare bill down, because a welfare system that is unsustainable is no protection for those in genuine need.

Let me press the Minister on a few points, because there was very little detail in his statement. First, after two years of dither and delay, the Government have finally accepted what we have been saying all along: the welfare system is in urgent need of reform. Ministers boast about consulting nearly 40,000 people, yet they appear to have ignored the most important stakeholder of all—the British taxpayer. When will the Government actually take decisive action to get the system back on track? Secondly, the Minister told the Work and Pensions Committee in June that the review has the power to recommend reductions, and that he had personally asked it to consider conditions such as anxiety and depression and neurodiverse conditions. Will the interim findings address whether PIP is the right benefit for those conditions, and will he tell the House whether he is ruling them in or ruling them out?

Thirdly, before this review began, we were told that spending would not rise beyond existing projections, yet those projections already build in £43 billion of PIP spending by 2030. Does the Minister seriously believe that this amounts to meaningful reform? Would it not be better for the review to focus on identifying savings and restoring the long-term sustainability of the welfare system, rather than rubber-stamping an ever-growing bill for taxpayers?

Finally, the Milburn review concluded that the PIP system is failing to engage young disabled people in meaningful conversations about aspiration, challenges and the support that they need, yet the Government response appears to move precisely in the opposite direction by extending PIP award periods and reducing the frequency of contact between claimants and the system. Does the Minister accept that there is a fundamental contradiction between Alan Milburn’s diagnosis of the problem and the Government’s proposed solution?

Welfare should be a safety net, never a way of life, and a Government who cannot reform welfare cannot control spending. Disabled people deserve certainty, and taxpayers deserve value. The country cannot afford yet another year of dithering and delay, so I ask the Minister simply: when will the Government stop reviewing and start reforming?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

The hon. Gentleman has set out some trenchant criticisms of the system that his party set up and left behind, and the question in everybody’s mind is: why did the Conservatives not do anything about it? They had 14 years, and they left the problems to which he has referred. He should be apologising to the House for the system that the party he represents left behind. The biggest ever rise in the welfare bill was in their last year in government.

We previously heard that the Conservative party has a plan for £23 billion of welfare cuts, although nobody has any idea at all what those cuts will be. The hon. Gentleman did not refer to that figure in his statement, so I am not quite sure whether the Conservatives now have a plan. He said that the Conservatives will review PIP; I welcome his belated recognition of the value of a review, but I do not know whether that means that they do not have a plan any more, or that they are throwing away the plan until they have carried out their review.

The hon. Gentleman has rightly expressed concern about the rising costs of the system—the public are rightly concerned about that—and particularly about the steep increase in the number of young people who are claiming, but we have set up work to address that problem. His party abandoned the growing number of young people applying for benefits; we will not do so. We are changing the question that the system is asking, and we are providing employment support and the youth guarantee to give young people the chance of a decent future.

The hon. Gentleman complained about the small number of face-to-face assessments, but that is what was left behind by the previous Government. Understandably, the system moved away from face-to-face assessments during the pandemic, but they were never brought back; that is the problem. We are increasing the proportion of face-to-face assessments, which is an important and positive step. When we were upstairs debating a measure to facilitate greater face-to-face assessment, another shadow Minister said that it was a “nice to have”, rather than essential. We think that face-to-face assessments are key to rebuilding trust in the system, and that is why we are making the changes we are.

The system that the Conservatives left behind did not work for disabled people, and did not work for taxpayers. This review will bring forward proposals to fix the problems that they created.