Reform pledges £50bn savings in ‘generational’ benefits shake-up
Reform UK has pledged the biggest benefits overhaul “in a generation,” unveiling plans to cut £50bn per year from the welfare bill.
Robert Jenrick, the party’s treasury spokesman, said the proposals would see nearly 3m people have their disability and sickness payments withdrawn or modified.
Jenrick claimed the UK’s existing welfare state is driven by “suicidal empathy” and fails to help those it is designed to support.
Under the plans, Reform would abolish personal independence payments (Pip) and the health element of Universal Credit for working-age adults, The Telegraph has reported.
Jenrick said nearly 7m people were receiving disability benefits, though the share of working-age people claiming for mental health and behavioural conditions has tripled since 2022. “This is not an epidemic of broken backs and lost limbs,” he said.
Under the planned reforms, due to be unveiled in detail on Monday, a new, regularly-reviewed, health security allowance would provide support for the “gravely ill and severely challenged,” Jenrick said.
Jenrick: Reforms won’t be ‘painless’
Cash payments for low-level conditions would end and be replaced with disability support accounts, run by local councils and mayors, to cover costs such as equipment, adaptations, transport and personal assistance.
Employers could be obliged to pay a “return to work cover” insurance to fund the cost of the first two years after an employee is signed off sick.
Jenrick said firms would then have a “strong economic incentive” to return the employee to work.
People who had not returned to work within two years would go through a single, rigorous assessment conducted in person to “screen out vexatious and fraudulent claims”.
Writing in The Telegraph, Jenrick said: “We will not pretend this is painless.
“Existing claimants will be reassessed over three to four years: we estimate that 2.16 million will keep their present cash entitlement in full, while 2.89 million will see theirs modified or withdrawn, concentrated where recent growth has been most explosive.”
He said the state must be there to support people who need it but “dumping our young people onto welfare isn’t compassion; it’s neglect”.
“We are not lifting people out of misfortune. We are abandoning them to it, and calling it kindness.”
Jenrick said the Reform proposals would save “more than double” the £23 billion promised by the Conservatives, with £22 billion of the savings coming from changes to disability benefits alone.
Tories: Reform ‘flip-flopping’ on welfare
Shadow work and pensions secretary Helen Whately accused Jenrick of attempting to distract from the parliamentary standards investigation into a £5 million donation to Nigel Farage, Reform’s leader.
On Saturday, Farage was returned as the MP for Clacton after winning a by-election which he triggered by resigning from his seat in July, in a bid to set up a “people versus the establishment” fight.
But all the major parties sidestepped the by-election, and Farage’s victory has caused the investigation into his links to crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne to be resumed.
Whately said: “Reform have been nowhere on the debate on welfare reform. They have flip-flopped on restoring the two child benefit cap and claimed they’ll only take benefits away from foreigners, which won’t do enough to bring down the overall bill.”
A Labour spokeswoman said: “Reform’s £50 billion claim is fantasy economics, built on stripping support from disabled people and shifting costs onto employers.”
Additional reporting by the Press Association