Mr Peter Bedford

“I thank the Minister for the advance copy of his statement. I put on record my thanks to the 38,000 people and organisations who took part and responded to the call for evidence. Let us be honest about how we got here. This review was not born out of principle; it was born out of panic. Last summer, the Government brought forward proposals for £5 billion of welfare savings, but 126 of their own Members rebelled, and within days, Ministers had abandoned the lot. The Timms review is a fig leaf draped over that failure—a review commissioned not to fix the system, but to get the Government through a difficult week. A year on, what do we have? An interim report. Not a decision, not a reform, but a report about a report, with a promise of full findings in the autumn, and perhaps legislation at some later stage. Meanwhile, the welfare bill keeps rising. Spending on PIP alone is forecast to reach £43 billion a year by the end of this decade. Every month of drift is paid for by working people, and every month of uncertainty is endured by nearly 4 million claimants. The Opposition accept that the system needs reforming. That is why, last month, we launched the Conservative party’s review of disability and sickness benefits. It is a root-and-branch review of a failing system that will look into who should get help, how they should be assessed, what form that help should take, the conditionality of support and how to control the level of overall spending. It asks a much more fundamental set of questions than this review. It sets out to make savings, as well as to build a better system. The Government have now had two years, one abandoned Bill and two reviews, but they have not delivered a single lasting reform. The official Opposition’s position is clear. We would restore face-to-face assessments as the default, because decisions of this consequence should not be made down the phone. We believe that people with milder health conditions are better served by treatment and support to get them into work than by being signed off for a lifetime on welfare. We would restrict access to sickness and disability benefits for those without a long-term connection to this country. We would bring the welfare bill down, because a welfare system that is unsustainable is no protection for those in genuine need. Let me press the Minister on a few points, because there was very little detail in his statement. First, after two years of dither and delay, the Government have finally accepted what we have been saying all along: the welfare system is in urgent need of reform. Ministers boast about consulting nearly 40,000 people, yet they appear to have ignored the most important stakeholder of all—the British taxpayer. When will the Government actually take decisive action to get the system back on track? Secondly, the Minister told the Work and Pensions Committee in June that the review has the power to recommend reductions, and that he had personally asked it to consider conditions such as anxiety and depression and neurodiverse conditions. Will the interim findings address whether PIP is the right benefit for those conditions, and will he tell the House whether he is ruling them in or ruling them out? Thirdly, before this review began, we were told that spending would not rise beyond existing projections, yet those projections already build in £43 billion of PIP spending by 2030. Does the Minister seriously believe that this amounts to meaningful reform? Would it not be better for the review to focus on identifying savings and restoring the long-term sustainability of the welfare system, rather than rubber-stamping an ever-growing bill for taxpayers? Finally, the Milburn review concluded that the PIP system is failing to engage young disabled people in meaningful conversations about aspiration, challenges and the support that they need, yet the Government response appears to move precisely in the opposite direction by extending PIP award periods and reducing the frequency of contact between claimants and the system. Does the Minister accept that there is a fundamental contradiction between Alan Milburn’s diagnosis of the problem and the Government’s proposed solution? Welfare should be a safety net, never a way of life, and a Government who cannot reform welfare cannot control spending. Disabled people deserve certainty, and taxpayers deserve value. The country cannot afford yet another year of dithering and delay, so I ask the Minister simply: when will the Government stop reviewing and start reforming?”