Starmer says ‘bulging benefits bill’ is ‘blighting our society’
Sir Keir Starmer has promised sweeping changes to crack down on what he described as the “bulging benefits bill blighting our society”.
The Prime Minister used an op-ed in the Mail on Sunday to vow to “get to grips” with the cost of welfare after figures suggested more than four million people will be claiming long-term sickness support by the end of the decade.
Legislation
Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall will announce a package of legislation next week designed to “get Britain working” amid Government concerns about the projected rise.
Official forecasts published by her department this week show that the number of people claiming incapacity benefits is expected to climb from a pre-pandemic figure of around 2.5 million in 2019 to around 4.2 million in 2029.
Last year there were just over three million claimants.
‘Mail on Sunday readers’
The Prime Minister wrote: “In the coming months, Mail on Sunday readers will see even more sweeping changes. Because make no mistake, we will get to grips with the bulging benefits bill blighting our society.
“Don’t get me wrong, we will crack down hard on anyone who tries to game the system, to tackle fraud so we can take cash straight from the banks of fraudsters.
“There will be a zero-tolerance approach to these criminals. My pledge to Mail on Sunday readers is this: I will grip this problem once and for all.”
Ms Kendall’s white paper is expected to include the placement of work coaches in mental health clinics and a “youth guarantee” aimed at ensuring those aged 18-21 are working or studying.
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Not Superman but the Mail on Sunday’s bailiff in the small claims court…
The thieving privatised rail and utility companies will have to beg a little harder for their bonuses…
But never fear Clark of Kent is here…to serve you Red Tories…
Crackdown on benefits alwaya speaks as if big benefits bills are about fraud, laziness, unemployment and sickmess. What about the massive Housing Benefits? Which goes into the pockets of landlords. So it’s Landlord Benefit. The biggest payment we make is for our homes. Rents are high (Landlord Benefit) because social housing is scarce. If a lot of people can get social housing then not so many need commercial rentals. If few can get social housing then lots are forced into commercial rents or mortgages. Up they go. Landlord Benefit transfers the dosh from government to the rich. Before Thatcher a… Read more »
Yet no mention of all those corporate scroungers and cheats who suck 100’s of 1000s, and sometimes 100’s of millions out of the public purse when they take advantage of any of the ill thought out “initiatives” that have been promoted by UK and devolved governments over recent decades. Despite lessons of previous decades, UK Gov went into the Covid crisis utterly unprepared to deal with the inevitable surge of spivs and shysters making dud bids for financial aid or peddling overpriced or useless PPE. The list is endless even before we start on the billions wasted on overpriced defence… Read more »
The truth is being subsumed, quietly shelved, the Fat Shanks effect, the Sunak rope trick, they have all signed up for it. The latest boss of the home office making sure her predecessors don’t set any precedents that might rock their boat…
And they all sleep together “you can be in my dream if I can be in yours” BD
It’s not just private landlords.
Hidden within UC payments are housing benefits paid to tenants of Councils and RSL’s, any idea how much that is?
If you want to deal with the fact that there is an increasing number of people claiming incapacity benefits you have to deal with the causes. The two major causes are: Long Covid which ultimately requires an increase in Occupational Therapists and Nurses; an increase in Mental Health problems caused by the Pandemic in the medium term and the retraction of the state in the long term. You can’t make people work when they’re unfit for work. That’s what the Tories tried to do and we know that at least 100,000 people died as a result of those immoral actions.… Read more »
How do you explain the fact that the UK is the only G7 country whose economic activity rates are still below what they were before Covid considering that Covid was the same for everyone?
Brexit and a shrinking the state. I mentioned the latter, but not the former. Why didn’t you factor that in? Also if you’re going to talk about US, and to an extent Canadian, socio-economic policy feel free to go and live in North America. As for France and Germany they have the EU. Australia has massive Chinese investment. Japan has already dealt with the impact of a housing crash in the nineties more than ten years before the rest of the Western World did. Next excuse for blaming the sick and the elderly for the problems of the rich NOT… Read more »
How on earth Starmer & Co propose to make the situation better by using the same Tory benefits and sanction system that has made so many people sick in the first place is beyond me. Covid certainly didn’t help. but the health of those in long term unemplyoment/underemployment was being negatively impacted for many years prior to Covid. Employment in jobs that are increasingly low paid zero hour contracts are even worse in terms of mental health than unemployment, and whilst it is true that employment is the best way of ensuring a decent standard of living, this is only… Read more »
His choice of rag to appear in, speaks volumes of his ambitions. Use the traditional Labour vote as given. On his knees for the far right. And people wonder how’s fascism rises, when nobody stands up to them.
He is off to see the Butcher of Riyadh soon, the cheat at every COP…
I keep wondering when these bastards will stop trying to gaslight us. They must realise they are failing?
Their presumption is at an all time high. The passive nature of a high % of the population is evident when so much harm is done by government policy yet very few get aroused to action.
The enlightenment is well and truly over…
We should all feel like Moses must have done…
Not corporate welfare? Not the parasitic royal scrounger family? Oh no, it’s working class people who are to blame for the country’s ills. Fancy that – a human rights lawyer who wants to gatekeep basic human rights from society’s poorest and most vulnerable.
When the Monarch taps you on the shoulder it can turn a man’s head…
.. or remove it, as in them good ole’ days !!
If Whitehall wasn’t obsessed with hoarding the wealth and opportunity in London, people wouldn’t be forced to take a cut in income to take a low waged insecure job. Fix the economy and you’ll fix the benefits bill. Very few people are going to choose to sit at home on benefits if three days a week working a part time job ten minutes walk away would double their income.
“Get people working” is something obsessed upon by the Tories but now is an obsession for Labour too. Is there any real difference between the two parties these days? Yes, there maybe a large benefit system – but why? Could it possibly be as a consequence of a poor working environment? Poorly paid with long hours? Benefits needed to top up the dross paid? Rather than constantly targeting the more unfortunate in our society – it’s time the Labour party acted like a proper socialist party and started targeting those on higher incomes and bulging bank accounts.
Labour = socialist? Now those really were the good old days. Have we got a realistic socialist party anymore? Remember the days when wealthy industrialists (not all of them I grant you) would build schools and libraries and homes for their workers?
As the late, great Tony Benn said, the Labour party has never been a socialist party but a party with socialists in it. I’m not sure that the paternalism of industrialists is something we should celebrate either – let’s not forget that their largesse was the product of worker’s sweat, so it should be for the workers to decide where and in what way the wealth is used, including schools, libraries, homes and hospitals for all without stigma.