RACHEL Reeves has disowned her deputy’s “clumsy” comments comparing benefits to children’s pocket money – just hours after backing them.
The embattled Chancellor, who unveiled £14 billion of spending cuts in Wednesday’s Spring Statement, was confronted about Chief Secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones’s comments on LBC that night.
Appearing on Politics Live just after the statement, which saw further benefits cuts unleashed on disabled people, Jones dismissed the UK Government’s impact assessment of the changes – which showed they would plunge 250,000 people into poverty – as being not the full story.
He said: “What the impact assessment doesn’t account for is the benefit that you get from additional money into support for training, skills or work.
“Take for example, if I said to my kids, ‘I’m going to cut your pocket money by £10 a week but you have to go and get a Saturday job.’ The impact assessment on that basis would say that my kids were down £10, irrespective of how much money they get from their Saturday job.”
Jeez. Treasury Secretary Darren Jones compares Labour's welfare cuts to cutting his kids' pocket money when explaining the Government's impact assessment "I'm going to cut your pocket money by £10 a week but you have to go and get a Saturday job" pic.twitter.com/t9yudlBqRM
— Peter Stefanovic (@PeterStefanovi2) March 26, 2025
Asked about Jones’s comments on LBC on Wednesday evening, Reeves backed her minister, saying: “If you have a 16-year-old and say ‘I won’t give you so much pocket money, I want you to go out to work’, and the OBR comes and does an impact assessment and says you’re going to be worse off, you will be worse off if you don’t get a Saturday job, but if they do, they will be better off.
“There are a lot of people who have a disability who are desperate to work.”
But asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday morning whether Jones was right to make the comparison, Reeves said: “No, he was clumsy in his analogy, and he’s apologised for that.”
Pressed further on whether it was right to compare benefits with pocket money, she said: “Of course it’s not pocket money.”
Elsewhere, the Chancellor insisted her reforms would get people out of poverty, contrary to Government forecasts.
Speaking on on Sky News, Reeves said: “I am absolutely certain that our reforms, instead of pushing people into poverty, are going to get people into work.”
But experts have warned that people will feel worse off over the coming years, with one think tank predicting the 2020s were shaping up to be a “disaster” for living standards in the UK.
Resolution Foundation director James Smith said the current parliament, from 2024-29, was forecast to be the third-worst on record for household disposable incomes.
“We’re basically in a position where the 2020s is now looking like a disaster of a decade, even relative to the two preceding it, in terms of living standards,” he said.
He said “things really get worse” if you focus on the poorest half of the income distribution, who are “basically at recession levels”.
“We project incomes for this group falling about 3% or £500 on average.”
New poverty statistics published on Thursday morning showed that the number of children living in poverty in the UK had reached a record high.
The Department for Work and Pensions said that some 4.45 million children were in relative poverty, which means that a household brings in 60% less than the median income after housing costs.
This is up from the previous record of 4.33 million in the 12 months to March 2023.
The latest figures in Scotland showed that relative child poverty has fallen from 26% to 22%, and absolute has dropped from 23% to 17% – though this is still above the Scottish Government’s interim targets.
In 2023/24, relative child poverty was at 22%, above the interim target of 18%. The final statutory target is 10% in 2030/31.
Meanwhile absolute poverty was 17% above the interim target of 14%. The final target is 5% in 2030/31.
The total number of people across the UK living in poverty is slightly down from the record high seen in 2019.
In the financial year ending in April, there were 14.25 million people living in poverty compared with 14.32 million the financial year before.
This is only slightly less than the record figure which was 14.46 in 2019-20.
