Peter Bedford is Member of Parliament for Mid Leicestershire and PPS to the Shadow Secretary of State for Work & Pensions, he also sits on the Work & Pensions Select Committee.
The welfare state was built on a decent and very British idea: that when life knocks you down, your neighbours will help you back to your feet.
It was a safety net, never a sofa. For millions of vulnerable people, it remains exactly that. Somewhere along the way the bargain broke.
Today too many find that the system catches them and then quietly keeps them; with the bill is being picked up by the very people who can least afford it.
The numbers should stop us in our tracks. This year the UK will spend roughly £333 billion on welfare. That is nearly a quarter of everything the Government spends, and more than a tenth of our entire national income. Working age and children’s benefits alone now cost around £145 billion. We spend some £77 billion on health and disability benefits; more than we spend defending the realm.
On current trends, spending on working age people overtakes spending on pensioners by the end of the decade. Read that again.
A country that is ageing fast is somehow spending more supporting people of working age outside work than supporting those who have already done their bit. This is not compassion. It is the precise opposite.
Behind those figures sit real lives going to waste.
More than four million people now claim Universal Credit with no requirement to look for work at all. Around a thousand new disability claims are signed off every single working day, a great many of them for conditions we would once have helped people manage and work alongside.
We are not lifting these people up…
…We are writing them off.
Telling them, in pounds and pence, that we have given up on what they can offer.
Now ask ‘who pays’?
The nurse finishing a night shift, The bricklayer out in the cold by seven, the shop owner worrying about the ever-spiralling wage bill. They get up, they work hard, they pay their taxes and they watch a growing share of those taxes flow to a system that has lost sight of its purpose. When the man who works overtime ends up worse off than the household next door that does not work at all, fairness has not just bent. It has snapped.
That is the heart of it.
This is not an argument about money first and people second. It is the reverse. A welfare budget that grows without limit is a moral failure dressed up as kindness, because every pound spent trapping someone in dependency is a pound not spent on the genuinely disabled, the truly sick, the pensioner who has paid in all their life. Letting the bill run away is not generous to them. It is a betrayal of them.
Work is the answer, and the evidence is on our side. It is estimated that every ten thousand people moving into full-time employment improves the public finances by around £180 million a year!
Get a million people back into work and the Treasury is better off by roughly £18 billion annually; enough to cut taxes for working families, fund our hospitals, and most critically rebuild our Armed Forces. But the prize is bigger than any spreadsheet. A job is dignity. It is routine, purpose, friendship, a reason to get up. The cruellest thing we can do to a young person is pay them just enough to stay on the sofa and call it help.
So, the choice in front of us is stark, and Labour have made theirs. Faced with a chance to bring the bill under control, this Government blinked. Ministers backed away from sensible reform, leaving the cost to spiral and the system more bloated than ever. That is a choice to duck the hard work and hand the next generation the bill.
Conservatives must offer the braver, kinder path. A welfare budget that is brought back under control, is not as an act of austerity, but an act of fairness.
It means support that genuinely supports proper help for the disabled and the sick, and a firm, friendly expectation that those who can work, do.
It means never again punishing the person who does the right thing. Restoring that balance is not about being hard on the vulnerable. It is about being honest with everyone: that a country is only as strong as its willingness to reward effort. Back the workers, and you back Britain.
Peter Bedford is Member of Parliament for Mid Leicestershire and PPS to the Shadow Secretary of State for Work & Pensions, he also sits on the Work & Pensions Select Committee.
The welfare state was built on a decent and very British idea: that when life knocks you down, your neighbours will help you back to your feet.
It was a safety net, never a sofa. For millions of vulnerable people, it remains exactly that. Somewhere along the way the bargain broke.
Today too many find that the system catches them and then quietly keeps them; with the bill is being picked up by the very people who can least afford it.
The numbers should stop us in our tracks. This year the UK will spend roughly £333 billion on welfare. That is nearly a quarter of everything the Government spends, and more than a tenth of our entire national income. Working age and children’s benefits alone now cost around £145 billion. We spend some £77 billion on health and disability benefits; more than we spend defending the realm.
On current trends, spending on working age people overtakes spending on pensioners by the end of the decade. Read that again.
A country that is ageing fast is somehow spending more supporting people of working age outside work than supporting those who have already done their bit. This is not compassion. It is the precise opposite.
Behind those figures sit real lives going to waste.
More than four million people now claim Universal Credit with no requirement to look for work at all. Around a thousand new disability claims are signed off every single working day, a great many of them for conditions we would once have helped people manage and work alongside.
We are not lifting these people up…
…We are writing them off.
Telling them, in pounds and pence, that we have given up on what they can offer.
Now ask ‘who pays’?
The nurse finishing a night shift, The bricklayer out in the cold by seven, the shop owner worrying about the ever-spiralling wage bill. They get up, they work hard, they pay their taxes and they watch a growing share of those taxes flow to a system that has lost sight of its purpose. When the man who works overtime ends up worse off than the household next door that does not work at all, fairness has not just bent. It has snapped.
That is the heart of it.
This is not an argument about money first and people second. It is the reverse. A welfare budget that grows without limit is a moral failure dressed up as kindness, because every pound spent trapping someone in dependency is a pound not spent on the genuinely disabled, the truly sick, the pensioner who has paid in all their life. Letting the bill run away is not generous to them. It is a betrayal of them.
Work is the answer, and the evidence is on our side. It is estimated that every ten thousand people moving into full-time employment improves the public finances by around £180 million a year!
Get a million people back into work and the Treasury is better off by roughly £18 billion annually; enough to cut taxes for working families, fund our hospitals, and most critically rebuild our Armed Forces. But the prize is bigger than any spreadsheet. A job is dignity. It is routine, purpose, friendship, a reason to get up. The cruellest thing we can do to a young person is pay them just enough to stay on the sofa and call it help.
So, the choice in front of us is stark, and Labour have made theirs. Faced with a chance to bring the bill under control, this Government blinked. Ministers backed away from sensible reform, leaving the cost to spiral and the system more bloated than ever. That is a choice to duck the hard work and hand the next generation the bill.
Conservatives must offer the braver, kinder path. A welfare budget that is brought back under control, is not as an act of austerity, but an act of fairness.
It means support that genuinely supports proper help for the disabled and the sick, and a firm, friendly expectation that those who can work, do.
It means never again punishing the person who does the right thing. Restoring that balance is not about being hard on the vulnerable. It is about being honest with everyone: that a country is only as strong as its willingness to reward effort. Back the workers, and you back Britain.