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

Baroness Maclean of Redditch Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Maclean of Redditch (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. I support the regret Motion tabled by my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott for the reasons that she set out so clearly in her excellent introductory speech. But before I go into that, I too want to say what a delight it is to see the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, on the Front Bench.

As has been said already, these regulations look like they are just simple administrative regulations. They look like they might be just fixing the backlog and look like they might be benign. Of course, nobody wants vulnerable claimants to lose their entitlements to those really important benefits because the department has not conducted a review on time. But that is not what we are debating here today. What we are, in effect, saying, is that it is acceptable for the Government to respond to a system that is failing by suspending one of the few safeguards that exists within it.

If we all cast our mind back to when the personal independence payment—or PIP—system was introduced, it was never intended to be a benefit that just rolled on indefinitely after it had been awarded. When Parliament debated and agreed the PIP system, the whole point of it was supposed to be based on the fundamental understanding that conditions can change over time and can get worse but can also get better, so you should not just lock somebody into a system of benefits and never look again. That is a fundamentally pessimistic way of looking at human lives.

I listened to the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Davies, and he was obviously very critical of the former Government. I am sure that he is probably right on a lot of those points—I am not an expert so I cannot possibly go back over 14 or 16 years of that history—but, at the end of the day, the current Government have been in power for more than two years, so there must come a point when they now need to take the responsibility for fixing what is currently presenting in the system and looking at the things that have happened on their watch.

If the department does not have the capacity to conduct the reviews, the answer cannot be to abandon them. We need to look at the root cause. Why do we have this backlog? Why do we have so many more claims in the system and this lack of capacity? It is due to the unprecedented rise in the number of people claiming disability and benefits. The growth, as has been said, is particularly striking among younger people claiming on mental health grounds. We have a social security and welfare system that is increasingly being asked to compensate for not just severe disability, which we all agree it should do, but a large and growing number of mental health conditions, such as anxiety, mild depression and ADHD, which would not have been recognised as disabling just a generation ago or even more recently.

Before I came into the Chamber, I saw somebody putting a comparator on X. I do not have the citation, but it is very interesting and I urge the Front Bench and everyone to look at it. The rise in mental health conditions and mental health disability is proportionately much greater in this country compared to about 40 other developed nations. We in the UK are not biologically different or biologically more likely to be disabled because of mental health than people in countries such as France, Germany, Canada, Korea, China, Singapore and so on, so we need to start asking ourselves some of those hard questions. I have spoken in this House on a number of occasions—

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Does the noble Baroness acknowledge that we should look at our society and ask why we might be suffering from higher levels of those conditions, and why people are not able to find a place in our society, as well as looking at biology?

[Baroness Maclean of Redditch (Con)]

I am sure the noble Baroness is right, and I thank her for that point. She has posed a very broad question, and I fear I would detain the House for much too long if I tried to answer it with the seriousness it definitely deserves.

I want to touch on a few themes. I have spoken in this House on a number of occasions about what I and a growing number of others regard as the growing medicalisation of ordinary human experiences—just life experiences. We do not do people any favours if we do not distinguish between severe and enduring mental illness, and the very broad spectrum of distress and difficulty that finds its way into our welfare system in one way or another. This is at the root of my worries about these regulations, because every change that reduces scrutiny or delays reassessment sends a signal that says to that person, “Now you are in this system, we expect you to remain there. Just carry on. You are getting the benefits. We have decided that this is the thing that is making your life difficult, and we are going to support you”. It is not saying. “We are looking at you through an optimistic lens about what we can do to help you move off this system”.

Reviews are not just a mechanism for saving money, but that is important. People have mentioned the Timms review, and I am sure it is an excellent piece of work. There are many good points in it. My real worry is that the Minister, when interviewed about this, said that he did not have any worries about the level of welfare spending. That is completely unrealistic; it is fantasy. We should be concerned about the level of welfare spending in this country. It is completely unacceptable, unsustainable, wrong for the taxpayer and wrong for people who are on welfare.

This debate and these regulations risk masking the true scale of the problem. We should be expecting Ministers to explain why they think this is acceptable. It is great that the Minister is here today, but we should be having a much more in-depth debate. We should be asking much bigger questions. Why do we have so many young people, in particular, in this system? Why are we diagnosing them with these mental health conditions that mean they are receiving welfare, PIP and other benefits? Why are we allowing this welfare system to reinforce itself and reinforce a life on benefits for some of these people?

I support my noble friend’s regret Motion, and I will certainly vote for it if she divides the House.