In today’s newsletter:
Keir Starmer’s partial backdown on the proposed benefit cuts greatly amused those who love to see politicians slip on banana skins. It has stimulated another round of excited speculation about the Prime Minister’s future by Whitehall watchers with nothing better to do. But I find it all rather depressing. The planned cuts, involving changes to eligibility for personal independence payments and to the rate paid for incapacity top-up to universal credit, had two purposes. One, to plug gaps in Rachel Reeves’s ever-changing spending and borrowing plans. Two, to make a stab at reining in the ever-expanding benefit bill. On the latter point, recall that we currently spend about £65 billion a year on health and disability benefits, but the OBR predicts this will rise to around £100 billion in 2029. When the cuts were announced in March, they were planned to save about £5 billion. At the time I said that this amounted to a ‘flea-bite’, but now it appears that the flea will go hungry. The concessions Sir Keir is making will mean that the savings are projected to amount to less than £3 billion. I doubt they’ll even be that. In the short run I expect a further increase in claimants as people rush to claim before the changes take place next year. And of course, once people get on to benefits they don’t easily come off them. 120 Labour MPs signed a motion which led to the Prime Minister’s capitulation. This is hardly surprising: as far back as the 1930s the Labour Left has never failed to oppose a reduction in benefits. Greens, Lib Dems and others provided a sympathetic chorus. The Conservatives couldn’t make up their mind whether to support the government’s plans (as they should have done), apparently only concerned with the immediate political buzz of humiliating Sir Keir. As for Reform, their attitude to benefits - as shown by Nigel Farage’s call for lifting the two-child benefit cap - is ambiguous. As a consciously populist outfit, they will be aware that 49% of those questioned in a recent poll – including many of their target voters - wanted higher, rather than lower, spending on disability benefits. Will we get still higher taxes as a consequence? Possibly, though I suspect there’ll be yet another accounting fudge as the Chancellor finds a few banknotes in the back pocket of her jeans. We’ll try to stagger on in the same manner for a while longer. One way out of this mess of course would be to boost productivity and grow the economy much faster, which would make higher wages sustainable, attract more people back into work, and raise tax revenue relatively painlessly. But the Employment Rights Bill just finishing its odyssey through Parliament will do the opposite, slowing growth, reducing employment, and raising costs. And our continued Net Zero obsession does much the same. At the moment reversal of these policies seems no more likely than significantly cutting benefits. The economy seems determined on politician-assisted suicide. Professor Len Shackleton Editorial and Research Fellow The best way to never miss out on IEA work, get access to exclusive content, and support our research and educational programmes is to become a paid IEA Insider. IEA Podcast: Executive Director Tom Clougherty, Editorial Director Kristian Niemietz, and Communications Manager Reem Ibrahim discuss welfare traps, NHS waste, and industrial strategy, IEA YouTube Is it time for an entirely new approach to welfare?This week, Dr Steve Davies has taken a timely and broader look at the welfare problem for Insider:
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