THE much-leaked proposals to slash welfare benefits saw the light of day last week. The Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall spent two hours responding to MPs’ concerns on Tuesday, with the headline target for reducing health and disability-related benefits by £5 billion dominating the headlines. 

The rising number of people on benefits is a major problem. One in eight people aged 16 to 24 is not in work, training or education, a shocking statistic which poses a major headache for the whole country. The benefits bill has ballooned since Covid and is forecast to double within four years from the baseline of the international banking crisis of 2007-08. 

The risk for the UK Labour government is that any positives from the green paper proposals will be overshadowed by the scale of the cuts to vulnerable low-income households. Iconic disability right campaigner Tanni Grey-Thompson described the cuts as “brutal and reckless” because they target disabled people as the problem.

Let us be clear that most disabled people are desperate to work and the British disability employment and pay gaps are a shameful reflection of our failure as a society to embrace the social model of disability. 

Under Kendall’s proposals, disabled people who rely on a personal independence payment (PIP) to help them with daily tasks, including going to work, may fall out of that labour market if that support is reduced or they no longer qualify.

Too many disabled people who want to work are already denied that opportunity. The Senedd’s equality and social justice committee heard that it took 20 weeks to access the UK government’s Access to Work scheme. Which employer would be prepared to keep a vacancy open that long? 

Too many employers shy away from employing disabled people because of their perception that the right to “reasonable adjustments” under the Equality Act 2010 will be too costly. The average cost is £75.30.

Others go through the motions of being “Disability Confident” employers, but the first two levels of the scheme promoted by the Department for Work and Pensions are self-certifying; only the Level 3 Disability Confident accreditation is externally evaluated. At the moment private and voluntary sector employers have a much better track record than public bodies and that needs to change.

Many low- and middle-income households who rely on PIP and/or the health-related top-up to universal credit are terrified of taking a job for fear of losing the hard-won benefits they rely on to survive, and the carrot in the green paper proposals to be consulted on, that those who try working will not lose their benefit entitlements if it does not work out, needs to be grasped with both hands.  

My correspondence with Sir Stephen Timms MP, the Minister for Social Security and Disability, encourages me to think he aspires to reshape the social security system into a helping hand in hard times rather than an obstacle course to minimise the amount of financial support people may get. Welsh Labour wants to make sure that happens in Wales by having the administration of welfare benefits devolved to the Welsh government, as they are in Scotland and Northern Ireland. 

But there is little doubt that the newspaper headlines will be dominated by the pain of households who could lose up to £9,600 a year from 2028-29 with the scrapping of the work capability assessment; only those eligible for the more restricted daily living award in PIP will get the health-related top-up to universal credit (UC), and, alarmingly, the person who cares for them (predominantly women) could also lose their carers’ allowance. 

The furore around cuts to disabled and ill people’s benefits is masking the measly one-off £3-a-week increase or 43p a day to the baseline universal credit from April 2026. This is of course welcome, but is unlikely to make much difference to households stuck in unaffordable private rented accommodation who are having to use the money they are supposed to spend on food to keep a roof over their head as the UC housing allowance deliberately does not cover the cost. It is worth remembering that nearly 40 per cent of UC claimants are in (low-paid) work. 

The UK Labour government will need to think of other ways to tackle the unacceptable levels of inequality in our country, whether it is taking up the invitation of Patriotic Millionaires UK to levy a wealth tax of 2 per cent on assets over £10 million, which they calculate would raise £22 billion, or extending capital gains tax on all house sales which would stop houses being seen as ways of making money rather than places for people to live in. 

Either measure would pay for a lot of much-needed new council housing (and for goodness sake suspend the right to buy in England until we resolve the homelessness crisis). 

Equally, taxing ultra-processed food and using it to cross-subsidise the cost of fresh fruit and vegetables would start to reduce the numbers of people claiming UC because they are too ill to work.

Jenny Rathbone MS is the Labour member for Cardiff Central and chair of the Senedd’s equality and social justice committee.