Welfare

Stephen Timms Excerpts

Wednesday 11th November 2026 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately]

My apologies, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am sure that that was not the intention of the hon. Member for Bexleyheath and Crayford (Daniel Francis).

Reforming welfare is not cruel to people on benefits—quite the opposite. What is cruel is failing to reform welfare, parking young people on benefits while taxing and regulating jobs out of existence, and telling people that a handout is the answer to their problems rather than going out to work. Truly what is cruel is what the Government are doing to hard-working families: squeezing them with tax rises, higher inflation and higher bills so that there is less to go round at the end of the month, all to fund the lifestyle of “Benefits Street”.

[The Minister for Social Security and Disability (Sir Stephen Timms)]

I agree with the shadow Secretary of State that failing to reform welfare is a very serious failure indeed. Her party was in government for 14 years. Will she tell us in which years spending on welfare fell?

[Helen Whately]

The right hon. Gentleman’s intervention is extremely timely, as that is literally the next bit of my speech. I thank him for taking me on.

The Government like to say that all this happened on our watch. Let me remind them what actually happened. Last time Labour left power—no surprises—we inherited high unemployment, a rising welfare bill and more than a million young people not in education, employment or training. During the 2010s we brought down unemployment, brought down the number of NEETs and brought down the welfare bill. In the 2020s, as we all know, covid and lockdowns accelerated the rise in claims for mild mental health conditions and neurodiversity, and the number of NEETs did go up, although it did not reach the level it is at today under Labour. When this Government showed up, they had no plan, and in fact they have only made things worse.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

rose—

[Daniel Francis]

rose—

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Social Security and Disability (Sir Stephen Timms)]

I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “House” to the end of the Question and add:

“notes that the previous Government left over one million young people not in education, employment or training, while overseeing a £33 billion rise in the welfare bill in its final year alone; recognises that since the General Election one million more people are in work and 397,000 more people are economically active; welcomes the imminent publication of the Milburn and Timms reviews; and supports the Government’s commitment to deliver welfare reforms that break down barriers to employment, support more people into good, secure work and bring down the benefits bill.”

The welfare system that the hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent (Helen Whately) has just been criticising is the one that her party designed and built, and then failed to reform when the Conservatives were in office. They failed abjectly on its financial cost and on its human cost. Over 14 years, they utterly failed to reform the system. She said at one stage that they had cut the welfare bill. I asked her in how many of those 14 years the bill fell, and she did not answer the question—not surprisingly—because the answer is none: it never fell in that 14-year period.

On the Conservatives’ watch, 2.8 million people were out of work due to long-term sickness. Progress on the disability employment gap stalled. It fell steadily under the last Labour Government, but it barely shifted during their 14 years in office. The number of young people not in education, employment or training went up by a quarter of a million just in their last few years in power. The number of children in poverty went up by hundreds of thousands, setting back their life chances and making them much more likely to be not in education, employment or training as young adults. Welfare spending rose by £33 billion in their final year in government alone.

[Dr Mullan]

The Minister is berating us on the question of spending during our time in government, arguing that we did not bring it down, but can he name a single one of those years in which the Labour Opposition asked us to bring it down?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

The hon. Member for Faversham and Mid Kent claimed that spending had been reduced; it never was. That never happened, and it would not happen under the proposals she talked about, as I will come to in a moment.

These latest ill thought through proposals show that the Conservatives have learned nothing from their time in government. They are making exactly the same mistakes all over again in opposition: crude cuts to put more people into poverty; more people pushed on to disability benefits; 1 million young people not in education, employment or training; and an explosion in the welfare bill. Those are crude cuts, with no thought for the human costs, which means that savings will never materialise. How much would their proposals increase child poverty? How much would they increase homelessness? How much would they add to their costs of failure?

[Priti Patel (Witham) (Con)]

I have a great deal of time for the Minister, and we have worked together on many welfare and other issues in the past, but does he not recognise that in the five-year period between 2010 and 2015, the number of workless households fell by 600,000? Can he please explain to the House, including his hon. Friends, why his party when in opposition—after the financial crisis and the former Labour Government had let unemployment go up—voted against every single welfare reform measure put forward by that Conservative Government?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

Let me tell the right hon. Lady about one of the welfare reform measures in that period. As she will well remember, disability living allowance was replaced by the personal independence payment in 2013. We were told by the Conservatives that that would save £2 billion a year. That saving never, ever materialised: it was never delivered. In 2017, they said they would save hundreds of millions a year by scrapping the higher benefit, on top of the universal credit standard allowance, payable to people in the intermediate category with limited capability to work. What happened was that large numbers moved instead on to the highest rate—up to the limited capability for work-related activity category. In that case, it was not simply that the saving did not materialise, which it certainly did not, but that they ended up spending a lot more. Even worse, once people had LCWRA status, the system no longer offered them help to find work. Those people were completely abandoned, which was a big part of the reason why this Government inherited 2.8 million people who were economically inactive on health grounds.

[Mark Pritchard]

The Minister has been in this place a very long time, and the whole House knows his experience on pensions and welfare reform. Can I just encourage him not to overextend his response today ahead of the Milburn report? There may be some contradictions between what he says today and what Lord Milburn says in his report about the importance of getting people into work and how that is compassionate. The most compassionate thing is getting people off benefits and into work, not topping up their benefits endlessly. He may find that the Milburn report takes a different view from some of the—forgive me—ideological points he has been making.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I have not been ideological at all; I am just telling the House what the previous Government did. Like the right hon. Gentleman, I am looking forward to the publication of the Milburn report, which, as the Prime Minister has just told us, will take place next week.

[Daniel Francis]

I have been a member of the Labour party for 32 years, and I believe that being a member of the Labour party means supporting people in work. However, I have heard Conservative Members and the shadow Secretary of State repeat the claim today that everything was the fault of covid. Yet the statistics, both the absolute numbers and in percentage terms, from my borough—the London borough of Bexley—rose more from spring 2022 to spring 2024 than they did from spring 2020 to spring 2022, so the fault was not covid. The fault was that the Conservatives lost control of the system. Why, therefore, do they have any credibility in arguing this case?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and the increase in the number of NEETs at the end of the Conservatives’ term in office was particularly staggering.

Just setting out a list that adds up to a big number does not solve the problem. The Conservatives should have realised that by now. Theirs was a catastrophic record—waste, lost potential, moral failure—and we are not going to leave that unchanged. Too often, their system was writing people off instead of giving people the help and support they need. We are absolutely determined to fix the system we inherited, in the interests both of those who depend on benefits and of taxpayers who pay for them.

We have already narrowed the gap between what people get on the health element and the standard allowance in universal credit. That feature of the system, which the Conservatives left behind, was forcing people to aspire to be classed as too sick to work. The social security system simply should not force people to do that. The system should be encouraging people to look for work and providing the support to make work feasible. That is what we are reforming the system to do.

We are restoring face-to-face assessments for health benefits, and I am glad the shadow Secretary of State supports that. The number collapsed under the Tories, as they were never reinstated after the pandemic. We have also started to change the equation under which the last Government spent £25 on benefits for every £1 spent on opportunity, because the best way to bring benefits spending down is to put opportunity at the heart of the system and get people into work.

[Jim Shannon]

I thank the Minister for setting out a very distinct way forward. None of us in this House on either side of this Chamber is against sensible savings in benefits, which are welcome, but that can never, ever be at the cost of the genuinely disabled or the terminally ill. I always try to be helpful to the Minister in these debates. Gordon Lyons, the Minister for Communities in the Northern Ireland Assembly, has taken a zero-tolerance approach to benefit fraud. By ramping up investigations, and tackling and catching benefit fraudsters, he has saved £60 million in the last year. Does the Minister agree that tackling fraud and getting those who can work into jobs has to be the way forward?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about the importance of tackling fraud—my hon. Friend the Minister for Employment took the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery Bill) through this House—and about ensuring there is always support for those who have no alternative but to depend on the social security system, and we will always do so.

Since the general election, 1 million more people are in work and the rate of increase in welfare spending as a share of GDP over the new Office for Budget Responsibility forecast is expected to be half what it was in the previous Parliament. That is very positive progress, but there is a great deal more to do, and turning that inactivity-opportunity equation around is key for young people, because the longer they are left on benefits or out of work at the start of what should be their working lives, the harder it is to come off those benefits, and the worse and longer lasting are the consequences. That is why we are making a £2.5 billion additional investment in the youth guarantee to get more young people earning or learning.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)]

The Minister is outlining the progress he wants to make in getting people back into work, and I know he has put a lot of hard work into that, but the reality, as we know from talking to businesses, is that they do not want to employ younger people now, because of the decisions taken by the previous Chancellor of the Exchequer: lowering the threshold for national insurance and increasing employer national insurance; increasing the minimum wage at a higher rate than for older people; and passing the Employment Rights Act 2025. Businesses perceive it to be too great a risk to be worth hiring somebody who does not have the experience others may have. I say openly to the Minister that those issues must be addressed if he is to open up the market and get young people back into work.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

We are taking initiatives to do exactly that. Contrary to what the right hon. Gentleman has said, I would say that employers want very much to give opportunities to young people, because they know that their future depends on that.

[Alison Griffiths (Bognor Regis and Littlehampton) (Con)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I will make a little more headway and then will gladly give way to the hon. Lady.

We are increasing, for example, the number of youth apprenticeships to reverse the 40% decline in starts in a decade that kicked away a vital first step in the career ladder for many. I can remember, as I think will others, Tory Ministers year after year announcing apprenticeship targets that never got anywhere near being achieved. On more work experience places, the right hon. Gentleman may have heard the recent announcement from the British Retail Consortium. Employers want to give young people a chance to break the “no experience, no job” cycle. There is a £3,000 hiring incentive to help employers who take a chance on young people, on top of the existing employer national insurance contributions relief.

I will give way to the hon. Lady and then I will need to make some headway.

[Alison Griffiths]

I thank the Minister for giving way. He will know that employers across all our constituencies, and particularly those in hospitality, who are typically among the most prolific employers of youngsters, are telling all of us on both sides of the House that the Government’s jobs tax, the Employment Rights Act 2025 and the increase in the national minimum wage for youngsters is pricing them out of the market. Will he reconsider?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I have told the hon. Lady about the announcement that the British Retail Consortium has made. Hospitality employers also want young people to have opportunities in their businesses, and I think we will be hearing more about that before too long.

We have youth hubs being set up in every community to offer wraparound health, housing and employment support. I visited mine in Newham last week, hosted by West Ham United Community Foundation at the Foundry in Beckton. It was full of activity and optimism for the young people who were there. For long-term unemployed young people, there is a guaranteed job fully subsidised by the Government for six months, which from next April we will fast-track for young disabled people after just three months.

[Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)]

I am very grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way. Can I just say to him very politely—he knows the House respects the work he has done on this issue and his understanding of the broad picture—that none of those interventions would be required were it not as a direct result of Treasury policy? Change Treasury policy and employers will employ people of all abilities and all ages across the country. He is destroying job creation and then expecting plaudits for providing additional taxpayer money to subsidise people to create jobs that his Government are destroying.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his politeness, but the NEETs figure rocketed in the last three years of the Tory Government and that was not caused by a national insurance change. We are increasing the employment rate, making progress and tackling the terrible problems left behind by the previous Government. I will give way one final time and then I really must make progress.

[Chris Vince]

I thank the Minister for giving way, and I will make sure I mention Harlow in this intervention. One of the things that I think the previous Government got wrong—I say this as a former teacher—is that they narrowed the curriculum. That meant young people who would have benefited from more vocational, practical courses were missing out on the opportunity to train. That is something Harlow College has done very well. I invite the Minister to see the courses it provides to get the long-term unemployed into training and employment. Will he confirm that he is working with the Department for Education to ensure that we have a broader curriculum to cater for everybody’s needs?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

Yes, I will. My hon. Friend will know that we have a joint Minister between the Department for Education and the Department for Work and Pensions to help us to make progress in exactly the way he describes.

It was disappointing to hear the shadow Secretary of State and other Opposition Members dismiss the support that we are providing. She would hear quite different views if she spoke to the young people hired under our jobs guarantee. Getting their first experience of a real paid job is a life-changing boost for a young person. It means an enormous amount to them and it is the crucial first break that they need, which we are determined they should have. They were not getting that under the previous Government. The truth is that people do want to work. Conservatives sometimes talk about strivers versus shirkers, and people making a mockery of the system—there was something of that in the hon. Lady’s remarks earlier. Deriding the efforts of people who may well be up against tough odds but who want to make a go of things is not the right way forward. This Government will stand alongside those people.

[Alison Griffiths]

Will the Minister give way?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

No, I am going to make some progress.

Anyone can find themselves in need of support at different times in their life. It will not be divisive rhetoric or public shaming that helps them to get on to the right track to make their contribution; it will be giving them a chance. That is what we are determined to do.

We have made a very important start not just with the changes to universal credit, the Right to Try scheme and the youth guarantee, but with more investment in employment support for long-term unemployed disabled people through Pathways to Work. We have 1,000 Pathways to Work advisers reaching out to people who the Tories just gave up on. They wrote them off as too sick to work and did nothing at all to help them. We know that many of those people want to work and they know they can if they have the right support. That is what we are providing for them.

We are encouraged by the early results coming out of our Connect to Work programme, providing tailored support for disabled people and others faced with complex barriers to work. The commissioning of that programme has been devolved to local government across England and Wales, because we know that councils are best placed to know in their local area who can provide the support that is needed, bringing together employment support, education, colleges, skills providers and the NHS to deliver the help that people need. We are publishing the results for each area every quarter, so that everybody can see how things are going and extra help can be provided in places where it is needed.

Sir Charlie Mayfield’s “Keep Britain Working” review has been looking at what more employers can do to make workplaces more welcoming to jobseekers with health impairments, and more accommodating to people who experience a health problem in the course of their employment. There is a great deal of employer enthusiasm for this, because employers recognise the benefits they can get from retaining their employees, with their skills and experience, and ensuring that they are supported to thrive in work.

[Alison Griffiths]

I thank the Minister for being so generous with his time. I would like to share the feedback I received from a business group in my constituency just before the Budget. What they tell me is that they would love to be enthusiastic about hiring and bringing on more young people, but they are feeling absolutely shackled by the taxes and regulations that are being imposed on them, layer upon layer.

[Sir Stephen Timms]

The British Retail Consortium recently announced a programme of 100,000 work experience opportunities and jobs for young people. There is a lot of employer enthusiasm here. Sir Charlie Mayfield, who I was talking about, started working up his ideas with 60 vanguard employers, after publishing his report a year ago. The vanguard group is now up to 230. With regional leadership across the UK, Keep Britain Working is working with another 400 employers, mostly small and medium-sized enterprises, to test and develop better approaches to managing health and disability in the workplace. We are looking at the reform of Disability Confident and we are recruiting an extra 480 staff to turn around Access to Work applications more quickly.

[Alison Griffiths]

rose—

[Sir Stephen Timms]

No, I am not giving way again.

Like the right hon. Member for The Wrekin (Mark Pritchard), I am looking forward to Alan Milburn’s report. His interim report on young people and work was a powerful rallying cry for change and a powerful indictment of the system left behind by the previous Tory Government. The steering group working on PIP, which I co-chair, will also be coming forward with our recommendations later this month. The final reports of both reviews will be published in the next couple of months. The Government will then consider the recommendations and bring forward a White Paper in the new year.

The social security system should always provide security for those who cannot work, but for those who can work the system needs to be a bridge to provide a way into greater participation. That means going beyond the approach we inherited that provides an assessment, writes a cheque and after that says goodbye, with no offer of skills or training and no opportunity to get a job. We do not just owe young people an income; we owe them a future. Young people were starting to doubt whether they had a future. We need to show them that a way is being opened up, as it is. It means ending the Tories’ “signed off, written off” culture, changing the question the system asks from, “What benefit are you entitled to?” to “How do we help you to live the fullest life, to fulfil your aspirations?”

[Helen Whately]

rose—

[Sir Stephen Timms]

I will give way one final time.

[Helen Whately]

I object to the way the Minister is describing our approach to welfare, which I do not agree with. I have talked about how the Conservatives brought down the working-age welfare bill during our time in government. The Minister appears to disagree with that statement. Can he tell me whether he is disagreeing because he includes rises in the state pension during that time—so he is considering the full bill including the state pension—or is it because he is looking at figures in nominal terms?

[Sir Stephen Timms]

The hon. Lady has perhaps taken some advice and is conceding that the bill never fell under their 14 years in government.

We need to learn the lessons from the success of what has happened in other countries, such as Denmark, which the Secretary of State visited last week to see how a focus on asking what people can do, not just what they cannot do, has given it one of the highest disability employment rates in Europe.

The Tory party signed people off, wrote them off and then blamed them. Our approach is very different: we want to invest in people’s success and give them the chance of education, training, a decent job and a full life—not a life constrained by the limitations of benefit income. That is the way to bring hope for the future and bring the benefits bill down. In the next few weeks, the House will see the two major reports that we are bringing forward. The Government’s response to them will set out the details of how we will set about that task, and I am looking forward immensely to the debates ahead.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.