On April 6th, 2016 – nearly a decade ago – I wrote a Cost of Living blog that discussed welfare benefit cuts from the then Conservative government. In the blog post I argued, as many have, that cuts to welfare benefits, especially those that are sickness and disability related, are not just morally questionable, but also impractical and unsustainable.
Liz Kendall, the current Work and Pensions Secretary, outlined on the 18th of March this year, a slew of cuts and increased conditionality around the provision of welfare benefit payments across the UK, that the Labour party hope will result in £5bn of savings on the welfare bill. It is a case of history repeating itself, and disabled people, as ever, are shouldering the impact. This is a holistic attack on the income of people accessing benefits relating to ill-health and disability, as it affects Universal Credit (UC) and Personal Independence Payments (PIP). UC (or legacy Employment Support Allowance (ESA)) payments are income-replacing. This means that the benefit is paid to those who are considered unable to engage in enough paid work to cover their living costs. PIP is a top-up benefit, which is provided in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in recognition of the additional costs experienced by disabled people in a society defined by ableism, such as higher travel costs, domestic or equipment costs. People can apply for PIP whether they are in paid work or not. Ostensibly, Scottish claimants of Adult Disability Payment (the Scottish equivalent to PIP) will not be affected by the changes to PIP provision, however, the reduction in UK PIP spending is likely to worsen the Scottish budget by approximately £115m.
Members of the Labour party have joined the media merry-go-round, drawing endlessly on tired PR practices of framing the cuts as a form of support for disabled people. On various media platforms we can hear ministers argue that the ‘clue’s in the name Nick, we’re the Labour party’, ‘we know that paid work is the silver bullet’ and, perhaps my favourite, ‘we just want to help people, who largely want to work, back into work’. And this may be true. The development of the Labour Party was built around the worker and workers’ rights as it emerged from the trade union movement and socialist parties of the 1800s. Work can be good for you. Most people experiencing worklessness would like to work. However, there are two key issues with these lines of argument, and the cuts that they are justifying.
The first issue is the focus on the recipients of welfare, who in this circumstance represent a potential supply of labour for the workforce. Ministers are outlining the support they will offer individuals to be more workforce-ready, which look suspiciously similar to previous governments’ measures. They include changing the nature (and name) of assessments; in this instance scrapping the relatively recent ‘Work Capability Assessment’ for UC and folding it into the same assessment that is used for PIP, it also includes increasing conditionality, freezing UC payments (which equates to a cut in real terms despite an overall increase) and changing eligibility to the benefit dependent on age. There are two slightly more original changes in the reform portfolio however. They include the introduction of an ‘unemployment insurance’ which is a time-limited replacement of UC(/ESA) for those of working age with a recent work record, with the amount dependent on an individual’s national insurance contributions, and a new ‘right to try scheme’ which enables disability welfare claimants to maintain their welfare entitlement when they first access employment. This latter change responds to long term arguments made by disabled activists that they risked financial security when attempting to enter the work force due to the inflexibility of welfare provision.
What all these changes fail to do though, is consider demand-side issues. Nothing that Liz Kendall presented acknowledged the levels of discrimination that disabled people experience in the workforce, how many people are ‘managed out’ when they become symptomatic, or are underemployed, mistreated or bullied. She did not articulate a plan for how to encourage employers to recruit people who have been out of work for perhaps more than a decade and/or are nearing 65, nor make a solid business case to employers about why they might want to.
The second issue relates to the argument that work is good for you, when there is extensive evidence that only good work is good for you. Kendall also omitted any detail on how she might begin to address the overall degradation in working conditions in the UK, as contemporary capitalism seeks to extract maximum outputs from the labour force while making minimum inputs, treating employees as an expendable single use product. The proliferation of exploitative and precarious work is not compatible with an inclusive, nor productive, workforce. Forcing people into an unwelcoming and unforgiving labour market helps no one. It is worrying that during Liz Kendall’s address to parliament, it was only Esther McVey, previously a Minister of State for Employment and Secretary for Work and Pensions, who thought to ask ‘Where are the jobs?’ – though even then, she was not saying this in support of disabled people, but as an attack on Labour’s ‘attacks on businesses’.
If reform is necessary, and I agree that it is, it must include dealing with the nature of work – which is a massive task given the stranglehold big businesses and their billionaire owners have on the labour market and global economy. It is only through radically revising how we understand and engage in paid labour that we can improve on Esther’s line of questioning to ask ‘where are the good jobs?’.
Déjà vu in UK Welfare Benefit Reform
Mar 19, 2025
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Mar 12, 2025
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Déjà vu in UK Welfare Benefit Reform
by Jen Remnant Mar 19, 2025On April 6th, 2016 – nearly a decade ago – I wrote a Cost of Living blog that discussed welfare benefit cuts from the then Conservative government. In the blog post I argued, as many have, that cuts to welfare benefits, especially those that are sickness and disability related, are not just morally questionable, but also impractical and unsustainable.
Liz Kendall, the current Work and Pensions Secretary, outlined on the 18th of March this year, a slew of cuts and increased conditionality around the provision of welfare benefit payments across the UK, that the Labour party hope will result in £5bn of savings on the welfare bill. It is a case of history repeating itself, and disabled people, as ever, are shouldering the impact. This is a holistic attack on the income of people accessing benefits relating to ill-health and disability, as it affects Universal Credit (UC) and Personal Independence Payments (PIP). UC (or legacy Employment Support Allowance (ESA)) payments are income-replacing. This means that the benefit is paid to those who are considered unable to engage in enough paid work to cover their living costs. PIP is a top-up benefit, which is provided in England, Wales and Northern Ireland in recognition of the additional costs experienced by disabled people in a society defined by ableism, such as higher travel costs, domestic or equipment costs. People can apply for PIP whether they are in paid work or not. Ostensibly, Scottish claimants of Adult Disability Payment (the Scottish equivalent to PIP) will not be affected by the changes to PIP provision, however, the reduction in UK PIP spending is likely to worsen the Scottish budget by approximately £115m.
Members of the Labour party have joined the media merry-go-round, drawing endlessly on tired PR practices of framing the cuts as a form of support for disabled people. On various media platforms we can hear ministers argue that the ‘clue’s in the name Nick, we’re the Labour party’, ‘we know that paid work is the silver bullet’ and, perhaps my favourite, ‘we just want to help people, who largely want to work, back into work’. And this may be true. The development of the Labour Party was built around the worker and workers’ rights as it emerged from the trade union movement and socialist parties of the 1800s. Work can be good for you. Most people experiencing worklessness would like to work. However, there are two key issues with these lines of argument, and the cuts that they are justifying.
The first issue is the focus on the recipients of welfare, who in this circumstance represent a potential supply of labour for the workforce. Ministers are outlining the support they will offer individuals to be more workforce-ready, which look suspiciously similar to previous governments’ measures. They include changing the nature (and name) of assessments; in this instance scrapping the relatively recent ‘Work Capability Assessment’ for UC and folding it into the same assessment that is used for PIP, it also includes increasing conditionality, freezing UC payments (which equates to a cut in real terms despite an overall increase) and changing eligibility to the benefit dependent on age. There are two slightly more original changes in the reform portfolio however. They include the introduction of an ‘unemployment insurance’ which is a time-limited replacement of UC(/ESA) for those of working age with a recent work record, with the amount dependent on an individual’s national insurance contributions, and a new ‘right to try scheme’ which enables disability welfare claimants to maintain their welfare entitlement when they first access employment. This latter change responds to long term arguments made by disabled activists that they risked financial security when attempting to enter the work force due to the inflexibility of welfare provision.
What all these changes fail to do though, is consider demand-side issues. Nothing that Liz Kendall presented acknowledged the levels of discrimination that disabled people experience in the workforce, how many people are ‘managed out’ when they become symptomatic, or are underemployed, mistreated or bullied. She did not articulate a plan for how to encourage employers to recruit people who have been out of work for perhaps more than a decade and/or are nearing 65, nor make a solid business case to employers about why they might want to.
The second issue relates to the argument that work is good for you, when there is extensive evidence that only good work is good for you. Kendall also omitted any detail on how she might begin to address the overall degradation in working conditions in the UK, as contemporary capitalism seeks to extract maximum outputs from the labour force while making minimum inputs, treating employees as an expendable single use product. The proliferation of exploitative and precarious work is not compatible with an inclusive, nor productive, workforce. Forcing people into an unwelcoming and unforgiving labour market helps no one. It is worrying that during Liz Kendall’s address to parliament, it was only Esther McVey, previously a Minister of State for Employment and Secretary for Work and Pensions, who thought to ask ‘Where are the jobs?’ – though even then, she was not saying this in support of disabled people, but as an attack on Labour’s ‘attacks on businesses’.
If reform is necessary, and I agree that it is, it must include dealing with the nature of work – which is a massive task given the stranglehold big businesses and their billionaire owners have on the labour market and global economy. It is only through radically revising how we understand and engage in paid labour that we can improve on Esther’s line of questioning to ask ‘where are the good jobs?’.