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.
This year, Britain will spend a forecast £333.7 billion on the social security system. That is 10.6 per cent of everything this country produces, and almost a quarter of all government spending. To put it another way, welfare now costs more than five times the entire defence budget.
And the bill is not levelling off. It is accelerating. Spending on sickness and disability benefits alone is projected to reach £132 billion by the end of this Parliament. Expenditure on Personal Independence Payment is forecast to more than double, from £21.7 billion this year to £44.7 billion by 2030/31, with the caseload expected to hit 5.4 million people. The Centre for Social Justice calculates that total welfare spending in 2030/31 will be £91.5 billion higher than it was in 2024/25.
Let those numbers sink in. As an accountant by profession, I have spent my career reading balance sheets, and I can tell you plainly: no business, no household, no country can survive a trajectory like this. Every pound of that increase must be found from somewhere. It comes from higher taxes on working people, from borrowing loaded onto our children, or from cuts to the services we all rely on. There is no fourth option.
This is not just a fiscal problem. It is a productivity problem. More than five million people are now claiming benefits with no requirement to work at all. Britain has millions of people of working age who are economically inactive at the very moment employers in my constituency tell me they cannot fill vacancies. A country cannot grow when a rising share of its people are paid not to participate in its economy. Spiralling welfare spending and declining productivity are not two separate crises. They are the same crisis, feeding each other.
But the deepest damage is cultural, and we are too polite to talk about it.
Somewhere along the way, we allowed a culture of something for nothing to take root. A culture in which the state is expected to provide first, and the individual to contribute second, if at all. A culture that quietly erodes the value of work, and with it the dignity, purpose and self-respect that work brings. Economic independence is one of the great liberators in life. It is the difference between choosing your own path and having it chosen for you. When the system makes dependence easier than independence, it does not help people. It traps them.
I say this as someone who knows what it is to have very little. I was raised by a single mother. From my early teens I worked to earn my own money for the things I wanted. Nobody handed me anything, and I would not have wanted them to. What I learned from those years is that work is not a punishment to be avoided. It is the foundation on which everything else is built.
And here is the uncomfortable truth that people say to me on the doorstep in Mid Leicestershire, in the pub, at the school gate, but which too few politicians will say out loud. We all know someone who is swinging the lead. A family member. A friend of a friend. A neighbour whose bad back mysteriously improves when there is a fence to put up. Most people on benefits are decent, and many genuinely cannot work. But everyone can see that the system is being taken for a ride by some, and seeing it happen breeds contempt. It creates a deep and corrosive sense of unfairness among the millions who get up early, do the right thing, pay their taxes, and watch others game a system they are funding.
That sense of unfairness is poison to the social contract. The welfare state was built on a simple bargain: you contribute when you can, and the safety net catches you when you genuinely fall. When people stop believing that bargain holds, support for the entire system collapses. The greatest threat to the safety net is not those of us who want to reform it. It is those who refuse to.
Labour had the chance to act and bottled it. The Prime Minister’s retreat on tightening PIP eligibility will alone cost the Treasury £3.9 billion in 2029/30. Faced with a choice between the national interest and his own backbenchers, he chose his backbenchers. That tells you everything about whether this Government has the stomach for the task.
So what is the task? Not tinkering. Not another review, another pilot, another taskforce. The problem is structural, and the answer must be structural too: fundamental, root and branch reform of the entire welfare system.
That means significantly curtailing eligibility, so that benefits designed for those who genuinely cannot work stop being a lifestyle option for those who simply will not. It means proper, face-to-face assessments rather than a system that waves claims through. It means time limits and conditions that make clear support is a bridge back to work, not a destination. And it means restoring the principle that sits beneath all of it: that individuals must once again take greater responsibility for their own lives, their own choices, and their own futures.
None of this is cruel. What is cruel is writing people off. What is cruel is parking millions on benefits, telling them they are incapable, and sending them a cheque instead of an opportunity. Compassion is not measured by the size of the welfare bill. If it were, Britain would be the most compassionate country on earth and getting more compassionate by £18 billion a year.
Reform will be hard. Vested interests will scream, and the same voices who oppose every saving will call it heartless. But the choice before us is not between reform and the status quo. There is no status quo. The current path leads to ever higher taxes, ever lower growth, and a society divided between those who pull the cart and those content to ride in it.
Britain is not doomed to decline. But we will decline, and we will deserve to, if we lack the courage to fix a welfare system that has forgotten what it is for. Work must pay. Contribution must matter. And the safety net must be exactly that: a net, not a hammock.
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.
This year, Britain will spend a forecast £333.7 billion on the social security system. That is 10.6 per cent of everything this country produces, and almost a quarter of all government spending. To put it another way, welfare now costs more than five times the entire defence budget.
And the bill is not levelling off. It is accelerating. Spending on sickness and disability benefits alone is projected to reach £132 billion by the end of this Parliament. Expenditure on Personal Independence Payment is forecast to more than double, from £21.7 billion this year to £44.7 billion by 2030/31, with the caseload expected to hit 5.4 million people. The Centre for Social Justice calculates that total welfare spending in 2030/31 will be £91.5 billion higher than it was in 2024/25.
Let those numbers sink in. As an accountant by profession, I have spent my career reading balance sheets, and I can tell you plainly: no business, no household, no country can survive a trajectory like this. Every pound of that increase must be found from somewhere. It comes from higher taxes on working people, from borrowing loaded onto our children, or from cuts to the services we all rely on. There is no fourth option.
This is not just a fiscal problem. It is a productivity problem. More than five million people are now claiming benefits with no requirement to work at all. Britain has millions of people of working age who are economically inactive at the very moment employers in my constituency tell me they cannot fill vacancies. A country cannot grow when a rising share of its people are paid not to participate in its economy. Spiralling welfare spending and declining productivity are not two separate crises. They are the same crisis, feeding each other.
But the deepest damage is cultural, and we are too polite to talk about it.
Somewhere along the way, we allowed a culture of something for nothing to take root. A culture in which the state is expected to provide first, and the individual to contribute second, if at all. A culture that quietly erodes the value of work, and with it the dignity, purpose and self-respect that work brings. Economic independence is one of the great liberators in life. It is the difference between choosing your own path and having it chosen for you. When the system makes dependence easier than independence, it does not help people. It traps them.
I say this as someone who knows what it is to have very little. I was raised by a single mother. From my early teens I worked to earn my own money for the things I wanted. Nobody handed me anything, and I would not have wanted them to. What I learned from those years is that work is not a punishment to be avoided. It is the foundation on which everything else is built.
And here is the uncomfortable truth that people say to me on the doorstep in Mid Leicestershire, in the pub, at the school gate, but which too few politicians will say out loud. We all know someone who is swinging the lead. A family member. A friend of a friend. A neighbour whose bad back mysteriously improves when there is a fence to put up. Most people on benefits are decent, and many genuinely cannot work. But everyone can see that the system is being taken for a ride by some, and seeing it happen breeds contempt. It creates a deep and corrosive sense of unfairness among the millions who get up early, do the right thing, pay their taxes, and watch others game a system they are funding.
That sense of unfairness is poison to the social contract. The welfare state was built on a simple bargain: you contribute when you can, and the safety net catches you when you genuinely fall. When people stop believing that bargain holds, support for the entire system collapses. The greatest threat to the safety net is not those of us who want to reform it. It is those who refuse to.
Labour had the chance to act and bottled it. The Prime Minister’s retreat on tightening PIP eligibility will alone cost the Treasury £3.9 billion in 2029/30. Faced with a choice between the national interest and his own backbenchers, he chose his backbenchers. That tells you everything about whether this Government has the stomach for the task.
So what is the task? Not tinkering. Not another review, another pilot, another taskforce. The problem is structural, and the answer must be structural too: fundamental, root and branch reform of the entire welfare system.
That means significantly curtailing eligibility, so that benefits designed for those who genuinely cannot work stop being a lifestyle option for those who simply will not. It means proper, face-to-face assessments rather than a system that waves claims through. It means time limits and conditions that make clear support is a bridge back to work, not a destination. And it means restoring the principle that sits beneath all of it: that individuals must once again take greater responsibility for their own lives, their own choices, and their own futures.
None of this is cruel. What is cruel is writing people off. What is cruel is parking millions on benefits, telling them they are incapable, and sending them a cheque instead of an opportunity. Compassion is not measured by the size of the welfare bill. If it were, Britain would be the most compassionate country on earth and getting more compassionate by £18 billion a year.
Reform will be hard. Vested interests will scream, and the same voices who oppose every saving will call it heartless. But the choice before us is not between reform and the status quo. There is no status quo. The current path leads to ever higher taxes, ever lower growth, and a society divided between those who pull the cart and those content to ride in it.
Britain is not doomed to decline. But we will decline, and we will deserve to, if we lack the courage to fix a welfare system that has forgotten what it is for. Work must pay. Contribution must matter. And the safety net must be exactly that: a net, not a hammock.