Does anyone really believe that Andy Burnham will succeed in cutting welfare benefits for 16–24-year-olds, as is being reported? Good luck to him if he really does have a go, because it is absolutely needed. The percentage of 16–24-year-olds claiming out of work benefits on the basis of long-term sickness climbed from a low of 5.2 per cent in 2018 to reach 9.3 per cent in 2024. Have we really bred a generation of sickly youths, or are some, just possibly, taking the mickey and claiming to be too unwell to work when they very much could? Burnham will apparently announce this week that in the future, young claimants won’t be allowed to simply sign themselves off on benefits and be left alone: they will have to turn up somewhere and do some work, or engage in some form of work-related training.
They will define themselves against welfare cuts, pretending that a runaway bill is not really a problem
Don’t expect it to go any further than a mere proposal. Just look what happened when Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves attempted to save the taxpayer a modest £4.5 billion a year by making it harder to claim Personal Independence Payments (PIPs) – a non-means-tested benefit that can be claimed by people who are either in or out of work. He was swiftly forced to backtrack after the threat of a backbench rebellion. The next day Reeves appeared on the green benches, sobbing. Two months later Starmer had moved his work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall out of the brief.
One of the backbench MPs who led the rebellion, Louise Haigh, is now First Secretary of State; Burnham’s effective second in command. Is she now going to sit by as her new boss attacks the benefits bill? The tragedy of this government is that a very significant proportion of its MPs could never, ever bring themselves to vote for a cut to the welfare bill. To them it would be tantamount to kicking away the crutches of the poor. It is the sort of thing that nasty Tories do, not them. They will define themselves against welfare cuts, pretending that a runaway bill is not really a problem, because it will always be covered by squeezing those mythical billionaires a little bit more. It is there, among the rich, that you will find the cheats – not among the ill and desperate jobless, few, if any, of whom could possibly be trying it on.
Starmer’s effort to cut PIPs was followed by the promise of a review, kicking the issue into the long grass. When an interim report by former minister Sir Stephen Timms was published earlier this month – in the last days of Starmer’s premiership – it concluded that PIPs are ‘no longer fit for purpose’. That is a standard phrase of government review-speak. But what does it mean? Bizarrely, Timms didn’t seem to think that a near-doubling in the PIPs bill in the past five years was much of an issue. ‘My view is that the current level of spending is not a great concern. What would be a concern would be if it carried on going up forever more.’
Timms has put the issue even further out of play. The same fate, I fear, will befall whatever Burnham announces this week. We will have a few headlines: brave announcement, Burnham using up some of his political capital etc. Then Labour MPs will get their talons into him and nothing will happen, except we might have another review. I am willing to place a bet: we won’t have any meaningful reform of the benefits system until it is the IMF, not a Labour Chancellor, who is running UK fiscal policy as part of a bailout agreement.
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