The progressive case for welfare reform

Progressives are losing the welfare debate. We need new ways to fight back.

The safety net for disabled people in the UK is in trouble, and it has been for a long time.

Recent weeks have seen another acceleration of the push for cuts. Tony Blair’s call to remove benefits from people with mental health problems means that Labour voices are now debating a position which is already the stated policy of both Reform and the Conservatives.

For those of us who want to avoid seeing huge numbers of disabled people pushed into poverty, the risk is that we’re dismissed as defenders of a broken status quo. We’re incapable of seeing the economic reality that the system can’t go on as it is, and of acknowledging the harm caused by growing numbers of people ‘written off’ by the social security system. However much we might want to challenge the terms, that is increasingly the starting point of the debate.

We won’t win this argument by staying on the defensive. Disability and anti-poverty campaigners were extraordinarily effective in response to last year’s cuts and achieved far more than many thought possible. But even then, what was left in the package amounts to a nearly £3k cut for disabled people receiving Universal Credit, alongside the promise of future cuts.

Writing for Arguably, Martha Dacombe was right to say that progressives need to set out their own case for welfare reform. But this can’t just mean using empathetic language as a window-dressing for deep cuts. Instead, I think a genuinely progressive response needs to do three things.

1 Resist the crisis framing

In the debates last year, the government painted a picture of a social security system at the point of collapse due to growing numbers of people seeking support for health conditions. But what gets left out of this story is that the cost of working-age social security has remained stable for more than ten years. Since the pandemic we have seen an increase in the number of health-related claims, but we’ve also seen the mainstream of the social security system hit by repeated cuts and freezes, keeping the overall cost level. The idea that the system isn’t sustainable only comes about because governments, faced with multiple spending pressures, a difficult economic environment, and limited headroom, would rather not continue to fund the system at the current level.

This isn’t a reason to resist any kind of reform. But it shifts the context for that reform hugely. The post-pandemic growth in health and disability benefit claims is one cost pressure for the government among many others. We saw from the spring statement reforms last year that the cost of reducing spending instantly is a substantial increase in poverty and hardship among disabled people. There are alternatives that would reduce spending more slowly but avoid inflicting this harm. That is the space which progressive policymakers should be in.

2 Get concrete about prevention

Progressives can sometimes be squeamish about the idea of policy aiming to reduce the numbers of people who need support from the system. This is especially true of PIP as a payment that’s there to support disabled people’s extra costs and is not means-tested or related to employment status.

But we need to engage with the evidence that growing numbers of people are being driven to claim both health benefits and disability benefits as a result of mutually reinforcing experiences of poverty and mental health problems. And the state has the power to better prevent both.

Given how much we know about the growth in caseloads, it’s remarkable that the government hasn’t yet attempted to articulate what a coordinated approach to upstream intervention would look like. The ‘Keep Britain Working’ review set out a seven year horizon for reforms that would prevent more people from falling out of work. But there’s no equivalent story to tell about reforms to mental health services, adult social care, further education, or wider action to tackle poverty. Last year DWP put forward the case for this kind of cross-government action but didn’t manage to win the argument internally.

We know that politicians and policymakers are sceptical about generalised calls for prevention or forms of ‘everythingism’ in which fixing one thing automatically resolves another. But supporters of progressive reform can push for the government to get granular about what’s driving health and disability benefit claims and monitor the impact of policies that we think will make a difference. Unless there’s genuine pressure for that kind of work ‘cuts’ will always emerge as the option that’s quicker and requires less complex coordination across government.

3 Make the argument for an empowering system

Successive governments have talked about how assessments for health and disability benefits are disempowering for disabled people. In his report last week Alan Milburn once again called for an assessment system which focuses on what disabled people can do rather than the barriers they face. This identifies a real problem but pairs it with an implausible solution.

An assessment for disability benefits is a high-stakes assessment for financial support. However you change its criteria or structure, people going through it will worry about the risk of seeming more well or capable than they actually are. And it is not clear how one could design a financial assessment that both encourages people to be optimistic about their capabilities and avoids penalising that optimism by taking it at face value.

But there is another way in which assessments disempower disabled people. They create fear. The fear that anything might count against you and leave you in financial hardship. For many disabled people that fear extends to working, volunteering, going to college, getting physically active, joining a social group, or anything that could be considered taking a risk or experimenting with your own capability.

The government has so far been timid in its attempts to address this fear. But there’s an alternative world where it goes at this problem head on. That means providing concrete, enforceable guarantees that disabled people won’t be penalised for starting work or volunteering, as well as reducing the assessment burden by providing much more clarity about how long a disabled person will have between assessments, and making smarter use of medical evidence to avoid unnecessary assessments altogether. This kind of reform is pro-work, but not solely pro-work. It directly improves the experience of disabled people but also addresses the problem that Milburn identifies, an assessment system which disempowers disabled people rather than leaving space to take steps forward.