LABOUR’S swingeing cuts to disability benefits are reckoned to be the biggest on record.
Given that record includes cuts during the axe-happy coalition and Tory government years, that is truly astonishing.
PolicyEngine, a calculator which measures the impact of policies and is used by the Treasury, estimates that social security reforms will push 134,000 into poverty and 28,000 into "deep poverty".
But despite claims that this is a moral crusade to get people into work, Labour don’t want to shout from the rooftops about the details of their cuts.
An impact assessment, which would outline how many people will be affected and how much worse off they’ll be, has been punted into next week. That means it will land, handily enough, just in time for it to be drowned out by the noise around the Chancellor’s spring statement.
The big reform that has got disabled people worried won’t directly impact Scots – that is the change to eligibility for Personal Independence Payments (PIP).
DWP Secretary Liz Kendall (above) has announced that it will now be harder for disabled people to get the benefit, which is not related to claimants’ ability to work and helps to cover the increased cost of living disabled people experience.
However, any money cut from the PIP budget will be passed on to the Scottish Government to deal with. Experts at the Fraser of Allander Institute reckon that could lop £115 million off Holyrood’s budget.
Elsewhere, Universal Credit is undergoing major changes. Incapacity benefits are being frozen until 2030 at £97 per week. Given that inflation will eat into that over the next five years, that is a real-terms cut.
New claimants will get even less from 2026, with the benefit being slashed to just £50 per week, though the Government has said this will be topped up with a new premium. Universal Credit payments for those looking for work will, however, go up.
The message is clear: If you’re on benefits, the Government thinks it likely that you are at it.
Some of these changes are things that the Tories could have only dreamt of doing but, for one reason or another, didn’t.
Congratulations here to Wes Streeting for condensing the essence of the Westminster Monoparty into just 23 seconds. Outstanding work. pic.twitter.com/HhGEWLhjFz
— A.V. Deggar (@ADeggar) March 13, 2025
Perhaps Health Secretary Wes Streeting put it best when he gloated the other day in the Commons that it must be “painful” for the Conservatives watching Labour “doing the things that they only ever talked about” – like cutting benefits and slashing the state.
“The public are asking: what is the point of the Conservative Party,” he told MPs. The public will rightly observe that that question goes both ways.
