Inside the false economy of Rachel Reeves's welfare cuts

New Statesman​

19 hours ago

Middle England was 'terrified'. This was the word I heard over and over from people on the street outside Biggleswade JobCentre, a low-slung shoebox of municipal green wedged between The Rose and Good Pheasant pubs – windows reflecting Union Jack bunting in a haberdashery opposite. This is a solid slice of commuterville England: war memorial on the green, mock-Tudor curry house, VE Day posters and Pride flyers plastered about.
The government's welfare reforms – removing PIP from future claimants other than for the severest cases – will hit the post-industrial north and coastal towns hardest, better-off parts of Britain like this Bedfordshire market town will face an unexpected embarrassment of circumstances – one that ministers don't appear to have foreseen.
A quarter of Personal Independence Payment recipients here in the Mid Bedfordshire constituency work – the highest proportion in Britain. Across the country, over half a million PIP claimants are in employment, at 573,620. Under the government's plans, people in their position, who need help to work, will lose their benefit.
PIP, I am reminded repeatedly by claimants I speak to, is 'not an out-of-work benefit'. It was designed to help anyone with a disability or chronic illness, whatever their financial situation, to live an independent life. Taking it away, as the welfare bill still intends to, will hinder the ability of disabled people to keep working. Nearly two-thirds of working people receiving PIP would have to reduce or give up work if they lose it, according to a study by the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, the charity led by consumer champion Martin Lewis – a man who knows a false economy when he sees one.
This is despite ministers' rationale for the cuts: that they will incentivise the rising number of 'economically-inactive' people into work. One Biggleswade resident whose PIP helps with her PTSD found that past welfare reductions pushed her into a 'cycle of losing a job and falling into dire straits', warned her carer. 'This is supposed to be a Labour government. Now they're doing what the Tories did, what's the difference?'
She's not alone. I hear from people around the country relying on PIP for transport, personal care, domestic work, energy, food, adjustments to their homes, medical equipment, wheelchair costs – all vital for holding down their jobs.
'I'm preparing for retirement – how do I carry on?' asked Bethany Colburn, 31, a senior systems engineer for the aerospace and defence industry in Dorset, who receives £290 a month of PIP to help with her cerebral palsy. 'If my disability benefit gets taken away, I don't see how I get back up.'
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From contributing to her cleaner and physio, an adapted bungalow, car and savings for a new wheelchair, PIP is 'a fundamental part of my life' and 'the reason why I am where I am and have achieved what I have'. Crying and shaking, she told me that removing or reducing her support would 'pull the rug out from under me – I'm genuinely terrified'.
In Oxford, Jo, a 44-year-old retail store manager with impaired vision and complex post-traumatic stress disorder uses her monthly £500 to pay for her bus fare and taxis to and from her full-time job, specialist glasses every six months, magnifying screens and other equipment. She would have to stop working if she lost her PIP. 'It allows you to live a life. That means you can keep that job up,' she told me. 'I'd be worse off not working, so I'd need to go on Universal Credit' – therefore costing the state more. 'We're not all benefits scroungers. Being disabled is expensive.'
Labour MPs have been reading stories like these in their inboxes day after day. They also know from their own local labour markets that the jobs don't exist for this hypothetical new workforce of the disabled and sick. 'There just simply aren't enough vacancies to match up to the government's employment ambitions from these reforms, and that's even starker when we look at disability-confident vacancies,' finds Sam Tims, lead analyst at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation poverty charity. 'These cuts, rather than motivating someone to find work, are going to create additional hardship, and that will push people further away from the labour market.'
Perhaps ministers assumed voters were still stuck in the New Labour and coalition era of public revulsion towards benefit 'scroungers'. A time of tabloid demonisation, Benefits Street, and George Osborne's 'strivers versus skivers'. Fairness and graft are indeed rooted deep in the British psyche, but life has changed. Many 'strivers' can only do so with the help of the welfare state: one in six people on PIP and four in ten people on Universal Credit work.
Covid meant so many more voters and their friends and relatives – across the class and geographical spectrum – came into contact with the social security system. Welfare is mainstream. In the post-pandemic year of 2021, the proportion of Brits who felt benefits were too low exceeded those who felt they were too high for the first time in 20 years, according to the British Social Attitudes Survey.
Today, most voters across parties wanted the government to reverse its decision to cut PIP, found More in Common polling. It offends their sense of fairness that someone who cannot wash below the waist, or cook a meal, would no longer be eligible for disability benefit.
In Biggleswade, anger throbs beneath the sunshine and hanging baskets. 'Believe me, I'd be back in work like a shot; I'd swap places with anyone,' said Julia, a care worker injured in a car accident who can no longer use her left leg. She had to leave her job because the care home was unable to make reasonable adjustments for her disability. 'If politicians think you're sat on your arse getting handouts, they're out of touch.'
[See also: Welcome to HMO Britain]
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