Will the government ever get around to reforming the welfare system? I ask because Andy Burnham seems to have bottled out. It seems that there will be no proposals in October’s Budget, and nothing before next year. The official excuse is that the government needs time to consider Alan Milburn’s review into youth worklessness and Sir Stephen Timms’s report into Personal Independence Payments (PIP) before it can deliver a considered response. Both have, though, already produced pretty detailed interim reports. Milburn’s final report was to have been published before the Budget but has now been delayed until after it.
It is not hard to see why Burnham should be so shy of anything to do with welfare, given that it was some very modest proposals to save £5 billion a year from the exploding PIP budget which marked the beginning of the end for Keir Starmer. A threatened backbench rebellion led the former PM to water down his reforms nearly to the point of meaninglessness in July last year. The day he announced his U-turn was the day that Rachel Reeves was seen sobbing on the front bench.
Burnham’s biggest chance of pushing through unpopular measures is now, during his honeymoon period
It wasn’t even going to be a genuine cut: more a temporary slowdown in the rate of growth in the PIP budget, which has nearly doubled in real terms to £37 billion since PIP replaced the Disability Living Allowance in 2012, and which is projected to rise by a further third to £50 billion by 2030. If backbench Labour MPs wouldn’t stand for a £5 billion trim to a non-means-tested benefit which is being claimed for minor, self-diagnosed conditions like ADHD, what hope is there of any meaningful reforms so long as Labour stays in office?
Perhaps Burnham has come to the same conclusion. His biggest chance of pushing through unpopular measures is now, during his honeymoon period. Fail to spend his political capital now, when it is at its greatest, and he risks going the way of other short-lived prime ministers as resentments build up against him and factions begin to shatter his cabinet.
There is a theory doing the rounds that Burnham will have more luck reforming welfare than did Starmer because the Milburn and Timms reviews will help him win the moral case. One of Starmer’s rebels, Meg Hillier, has suggested that the interim report from Milburn, which has proposed that 600,000 young people are not in work, education or training because the welfare system has trapped them there, has helped change her mind. Just wait until firm proposals are tabled – if they ever are tabled – and real people are moaning because they are facing the loss of their benefits. Will Hillier still back welfare reform then?
The fundamental problem is that there is a large bulk of Labour MPs who think that benefit claimants are saintly. They will never, ever bring themselves to vote for cuts because they think that would turn them into callous Tory and Reform MPs. No matter how you dress up welfare reform – as a moral crusade to get people back into work – you cannot withdraw the benefits punchbowl without upsetting people who are living comfortably off it.
The easier option if you are a left-wing politician wanting to show off your human decency is to do nothing. You can pretend that the welfare system is not really all that much of a burden and that there are plenty of billionaires out there who can always be called upon to stump up a little more loose change in order to fund it. It is a dangerous delusion, but one which the Milburn and Timms reviews are unlikely to dispel.
Comments