Anna Ridgway is National Coordinator for Students for Liberty UK.
Sixteen journalists put questions to Robert Jenrick yesterday. They asked about Brexit, the European Court, a deportation case in Sweden, climate change, planning reform, and whether either he or Richard Tice had ever been catfished. Not one asked about the two measures that tell you what the whole thing is for.
Robert Jenrick set out his party’s welfare plans, and some of the weekend coverage described this as abolishing Personal Independence Payment (PIP). That is not quite what the paper says
“We’re not abolishing PIP,” Jenrick told The Times, when asked what his message was to frightened claimants. Instead, the paper suggests that it would be maintained, reformed and enhanced. What it would do instead is reassess 2.89 million people, starting with mental health claimants and what the paper calls ‘trivial conditions’. Those with severe and enduring conditions keep their cash awards.
This diagnosis is sound.
Disability and incapacity claims have almost doubled in under a decade. Reform’s own paper puts mental and behavioural conditions at 44 per cent of disability claimants in 2024, against 25 per cent in 2002, and notes that the number of children receiving disability benefits has doubled in ten years. Britain has not become twice as sick, and the reassessment machinery never recovered from the pandemic. Very little of that is wrong.
Saying so out loud costs something, which is why nobody else has. Ask anyone to picture a disability benefit claimant. What they picture is a wheelchair, multiple sclerosis or a spinal injury. Somebody who plainly needs support from the state and always will. This person is real, and they are exactly who the system exists for. But while this individual is the picture in everyones’ heads, any sort of change to the system reads as an attack on her. And when faced with this attack, the argument stops there.
Labour attempted modest savings last summer, but their own backbenchers gutted the bill within days. Reform have put their names to a plan that will lose them votes in the seats which they most need to win, and have not pretended otherwise.
The question is who pays, and the answer is in the back of the document.
Fraser Nelson has put the political problem well: Reform’s vote correlates with welfare dependency more strongly than any other party. This leaves two scenarios. Either Reform are committing to slashing the welfare of their own voters, or the £50 billion is fictional.
Having read the paper, there is enough in the costings to see where the money is meant to come from. The large savings are roughly where you would expect them: in tighter disability entitlements and in restricting benefits to British citizens. The measure Jenrick called “the final change and perhaps the biggest change of all” – twenty hours a week of community work organised by councils – is worth £486 million against savings of £44.7 billion. About one per cent, and the part of the plan which most people will hear about.
The two that reveal the real trade-off are hidden away near the back.
Something our own side keeps getting wrong matters here. PIP does not pay people to stay at home. It is not means tested, it is not contributory, and it is not linked to a claimant’s ability to work. Every time someone on the right says otherwise, the rebuttal writes itself.
Under Reform’s plan, it would stop being true. On page 25, filed under “Technical and Already-Announced Changes“, Reform would means-test the new disability payment against a claimant’s earnings, their partner’s earnings and their assets.
PIP has never been means tested, and that has always been central to its design. It pays for the extra costs of being disabled. Those costs do not fall when you get a pay rise. That is why it goes to people in work, and why working is possible for a great many claimants.
Means test it, and earning more can mean losing money that covers costs you still have. A disabled person taking a better paid job could therefore face a withdrawal of support intended to compensate for expenses that do not disappear when her income rises. The better job becomes less worthwhile.
That is a work disincentive, introduced by a paper about restoring work incentives.
Jenrick opened the press conference with Beveridge, on a state that gives security in return for contribution and “would not stifle incentive, opportunity, and responsibility“. He closed on the same idea. No more something for nothing. But a means test is not a contributory principle. It withdraws support according to what your household has now, regardless of what you have put in.
This is not my inference. Reform have costed it. Their employment table projects 241,000 more people in work by 2029-30, which is the figure they will quote, and most of it comes from the disability reforms. But one line in that table pulls the other way. Tapering disability benefits, Reform estimates, reduces employment by 14,000.
It is the only negative number in the column. They also say the saving comes largely from high-income households, and since the test runs against earnings, a partner’s earnings and assets, that means it comes from disabled households which have managed to build something.
The second saving is bigger and much simpler. Reform would change the way inflation is measured, to a new figure they expect to come to roughly 0.6 percentage points a year lower than the current one. They have not set up the commission that is meant to produce it, but they have costed the answer already. Benefits would then rise by that smaller number instead, and by less again the year after.
Working-age benefits, that is.
Pensioners will keep the triple lock – which raises the state pension by whichever is highest of earnings, inflation or 2.5 per cent.
So, one payment is locked into rising as fast as possible, the other into rising as slowly as possible, and the line between them is pension age. That is £4.8 billion a year by 2033-34. It occupies less than a page, and not one journalist at the press conference asked about it.
None of this is accidental. Without these changes, Jenrick said that “we will face a genuine national debt crisis“. He is absolutely right about that. Then he was asked about PIP claimants in Reform’s target seats, and stated that “nothing that we talk about today is about pensioners“, and that it is by doing the tough things that a Reform government can “continue to sustainably pay for the triple lock.”
There it is, said out loud. The state pension is the largest single benefit the state pays and one of the biggest long-term pressures on the public finances, and it is the one line Reform will not touch. Valentin Boboc puts the scale of that well: to find £50 billion immediately, one would have to cut the state pension by about a third. That is how large a number Reform have promised. And they have ruled out looking for any of it in pensioner spending, which is roughly half of the entire welfare bill.
He also argues that the headline savings rest on assumptions rather than mechanisms. The £20 billion from tighter eligibility depends on how reassessments land, and nobody has independently scored it. The means test and the new inflation measure are different. They are rules, they apply automatically, and they stop at pension age.
So the debt crisis is real enough to justify means-testing disability support and reindexing working-age benefits, and not real enough to reach the largest payment in the system.
You cannot invoke a debt crisis and then ring-fence one of its largest drivers.
If the crisis is real, the honest version of this paper applies one test on both sides of the line. Assess need rather than age, and index everything the same way.
I want welfare reform. I have argued here before that the bill is unsustainable and that my generation will be paying for it long after the people defending it are gone. So I am the audience for this reform.
What it proposes is that a disabled twenty-five-year-old in work loses support they currently keep, that everyone under pension age has their benefits indexed to a slower measure of inflation, and that the proceeds help guarantee a non-means-tested payment to the age group with the highest median household wealth in the country.
Jenrick says that the social contract is broken. He is right about that too. But what he has written is a new one, and only one generation has been asked to sign it.
Anna Ridgway is National Coordinator for Students for Liberty UK.
Sixteen journalists put questions to Robert Jenrick yesterday. They asked about Brexit, the European Court, a deportation case in Sweden, climate change, planning reform, and whether either he or Richard Tice had ever been catfished. Not one asked about the two measures that tell you what the whole thing is for.
Robert Jenrick set out his party’s welfare plans, and some of the weekend coverage described this as abolishing Personal Independence Payment (PIP). That is not quite what the paper says
“We’re not abolishing PIP,” Jenrick told The Times, when asked what his message was to frightened claimants. Instead, the paper suggests that it would be maintained, reformed and enhanced. What it would do instead is reassess 2.89 million people, starting with mental health claimants and what the paper calls ‘trivial conditions’. Those with severe and enduring conditions keep their cash awards.
This diagnosis is sound.
Disability and incapacity claims have almost doubled in under a decade. Reform’s own paper puts mental and behavioural conditions at 44 per cent of disability claimants in 2024, against 25 per cent in 2002, and notes that the number of children receiving disability benefits has doubled in ten years. Britain has not become twice as sick, and the reassessment machinery never recovered from the pandemic. Very little of that is wrong.
Saying so out loud costs something, which is why nobody else has. Ask anyone to picture a disability benefit claimant. What they picture is a wheelchair, multiple sclerosis or a spinal injury. Somebody who plainly needs support from the state and always will. This person is real, and they are exactly who the system exists for. But while this individual is the picture in everyones’ heads, any sort of change to the system reads as an attack on her. And when faced with this attack, the argument stops there.
Labour attempted modest savings last summer, but their own backbenchers gutted the bill within days. Reform have put their names to a plan that will lose them votes in the seats which they most need to win, and have not pretended otherwise.
The question is who pays, and the answer is in the back of the document.
Fraser Nelson has put the political problem well: Reform’s vote correlates with welfare dependency more strongly than any other party. This leaves two scenarios. Either Reform are committing to slashing the welfare of their own voters, or the £50 billion is fictional.
Having read the paper, there is enough in the costings to see where the money is meant to come from. The large savings are roughly where you would expect them: in tighter disability entitlements and in restricting benefits to British citizens. The measure Jenrick called “the final change and perhaps the biggest change of all” – twenty hours a week of community work organised by councils – is worth £486 million against savings of £44.7 billion. About one per cent, and the part of the plan which most people will hear about.
The two that reveal the real trade-off are hidden away near the back.
Something our own side keeps getting wrong matters here. PIP does not pay people to stay at home. It is not means tested, it is not contributory, and it is not linked to a claimant’s ability to work. Every time someone on the right says otherwise, the rebuttal writes itself.
Under Reform’s plan, it would stop being true. On page 25, filed under “Technical and Already-Announced Changes“, Reform would means-test the new disability payment against a claimant’s earnings, their partner’s earnings and their assets.
PIP has never been means tested, and that has always been central to its design. It pays for the extra costs of being disabled. Those costs do not fall when you get a pay rise. That is why it goes to people in work, and why working is possible for a great many claimants.
Means test it, and earning more can mean losing money that covers costs you still have. A disabled person taking a better paid job could therefore face a withdrawal of support intended to compensate for expenses that do not disappear when her income rises. The better job becomes less worthwhile.
That is a work disincentive, introduced by a paper about restoring work incentives.
Jenrick opened the press conference with Beveridge, on a state that gives security in return for contribution and “would not stifle incentive, opportunity, and responsibility“. He closed on the same idea. No more something for nothing. But a means test is not a contributory principle. It withdraws support according to what your household has now, regardless of what you have put in.
This is not my inference. Reform have costed it. Their employment table projects 241,000 more people in work by 2029-30, which is the figure they will quote, and most of it comes from the disability reforms. But one line in that table pulls the other way. Tapering disability benefits, Reform estimates, reduces employment by 14,000.
It is the only negative number in the column. They also say the saving comes largely from high-income households, and since the test runs against earnings, a partner’s earnings and assets, that means it comes from disabled households which have managed to build something.
The second saving is bigger and much simpler. Reform would change the way inflation is measured, to a new figure they expect to come to roughly 0.6 percentage points a year lower than the current one. They have not set up the commission that is meant to produce it, but they have costed the answer already. Benefits would then rise by that smaller number instead, and by less again the year after.
Working-age benefits, that is.
Pensioners will keep the triple lock – which raises the state pension by whichever is highest of earnings, inflation or 2.5 per cent.
So, one payment is locked into rising as fast as possible, the other into rising as slowly as possible, and the line between them is pension age. That is £4.8 billion a year by 2033-34. It occupies less than a page, and not one journalist at the press conference asked about it.
None of this is accidental. Without these changes, Jenrick said that “we will face a genuine national debt crisis“. He is absolutely right about that. Then he was asked about PIP claimants in Reform’s target seats, and stated that “nothing that we talk about today is about pensioners“, and that it is by doing the tough things that a Reform government can “continue to sustainably pay for the triple lock.”
There it is, said out loud. The state pension is the largest single benefit the state pays and one of the biggest long-term pressures on the public finances, and it is the one line Reform will not touch. Valentin Boboc puts the scale of that well: to find £50 billion immediately, one would have to cut the state pension by about a third. That is how large a number Reform have promised. And they have ruled out looking for any of it in pensioner spending, which is roughly half of the entire welfare bill.
He also argues that the headline savings rest on assumptions rather than mechanisms. The £20 billion from tighter eligibility depends on how reassessments land, and nobody has independently scored it. The means test and the new inflation measure are different. They are rules, they apply automatically, and they stop at pension age.
So the debt crisis is real enough to justify means-testing disability support and reindexing working-age benefits, and not real enough to reach the largest payment in the system.
You cannot invoke a debt crisis and then ring-fence one of its largest drivers.
If the crisis is real, the honest version of this paper applies one test on both sides of the line. Assess need rather than age, and index everything the same way.
I want welfare reform. I have argued here before that the bill is unsustainable and that my generation will be paying for it long after the people defending it are gone. So I am the audience for this reform.
What it proposes is that a disabled twenty-five-year-old in work loses support they currently keep, that everyone under pension age has their benefits indexed to a slower measure of inflation, and that the proceeds help guarantee a non-means-tested payment to the age group with the highest median household wealth in the country.
Jenrick says that the social contract is broken. He is right about that too. But what he has written is a new one, and only one generation has been asked to sign it.