OPINION
Helen Whately was previously a Treasury minister - now she is Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary (Image: Simon Walker)
The sickness bill is spiralling out of control. It’s set to rise to ￡100 billion by the end of the decade. That’s one and a half times the defence budget. At this rate it will soon be a national emergency.
Just as we said during the election, Labour arrived in Government without a plan to deal with it. They have spent the last nine months talking about the problem without coming up with any answers.
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Those months of dither and delay while they figure out what to do have already cost the taxpayer ￡7billion and counting. This coming week we will finally hear what Keir Starmer has to offer the country on welfare. But I’m not holding my breath.
What I have heard to date falls far short of the much-needed radical reform to make sure those who can work, do work. It’s too little, too late.
Why too late, you might ask, when the election was just last year? Because proper welfare reform is hard and takes time. And every day that passes the problem gets worse.
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Since Labour came into power almost 2,000 people a day have signed up for sickness benefits. Once on benefits, few people ever come off. So that’s millions of people spending the rest of their working lives NOT working. Right now, 2.8 million and counting.
Worse still, the rise is fastest among young people. So just at the age when someone should be starting out at work, instead they are signing on.
We committed at the election to make ￡12 billion in savings in the annual sickness benefits bill between now and 2030.
Jeremy Hunt, our former Chancellor, reckons the Government can go further – back to the level of benefits before the pandemic. After all, there’s no evidence that people’s health has got materially worse.
If Labour doesn’t grasp this, it will tell us what we fear; that they are giving up on the UK.
Rather than making things better, their ‘best case scenario’ would just slow down the pace at which things get worse. That is the definition of managed decline.
But that should come as no surprise. Sir Keir Starmer made growth his number one mission. But just this week, we heard the latest dismal growth stats: the economy has shrunk by 0.1%.
It must be slowly dawning on Sir Keir and Rachel Reeves that you can’t just talk growth into existence with empty slogans and hollow promises. In fact, if you wack extra taxes on jobs and extra bureaucracy on businesses, you do the opposite. You crush growth.
Starmer has crossed the street to pick a fight with businesses, drowned them in a tidal wave of red tape with his employment bill - the first in history that will do the exact opposite of what it says on the tin - and slapped on a jobs tax.
The best way to tackle the sickness benefits bill is to get more people into work. But there need to be good jobs to go to. What Labour’s been doing will mean fewer jobs, lower pay and extra costs on working people.
Labour governments always leave office with unemployment higher than when they found it. This Government is well on its way to maintaining that sorry record.
We did not get everything right in government. There is a reason we lost the election. But in our time in office we created 500 jobs a day, with 4 million more jobs in 2024 than in 2010. In the deceptively short time Labour have been in office, there are already 100,000 fewer jobs than when they came in.
We all know Keir Starmer is a lawyer, but what Britain needs is a leader.
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This is a task I want to see the government succeed in. They have to get a grip of the problem. It is unfair for the taxpayers to foot an ever-increasing welfare bill. It is unfair for those in our cities, towns and villages who pay the price of worklessness. And it is unfair to those people who could and should be working to be signed off and given up on.
This is too serious just to watch the Government fail. That’s why, if they decide to continue the reforms we started – even after months of delay – we will support them. And if it’s clear they don’t have the ideas the country needs, we will use our time in opposition to work up those ideas and share them.
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With Russia refusing to get out of Ukraine and Trump pointing his finger at European countries to step up on defence, we simply can’t let the Government waste billions on benefits.
Helen Whately is Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary