Liz Kendall MP: speeches

Speeches

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  I think that everyone’s situation and condition is individual and personal to them, and that is why it is important that any reassessments are done on an individual case-by-case basis. There will be people with psychosis and schizophrenia who can never work, but I have met people in Leicester with precisely those conditions who have got work through the employment advice provided by the NHS’s individual placement and support service. That is why, as I have said, the pathways to work employment support is personalised and tailored to individual need. Given the size and complexity of the social security system, it is not easy for me to provide an answer now for the people whom the hon. Gentleman has mentioned. That is why we must have those personal assessments, and I want much more to be done to ensure that they are carried out properly.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend raises a very important point. As I said earlier, we will publish the equality impact analysis and the poverty impact analysis around the time of the spring statement. It is really important that we look at how more people will benefit from being in work and improving their incomes—that is essential. We will also come forward with our child poverty strategy, because we have a clear manifesto commitment to drive child poverty down. Children growing up in poverty could have their life chances damaged for years to come, and we are determined to put that right.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  I am delighted to tell my hon. Friend that today we launched a consultation on equality pay gap reporting, and I hope that that will make a huge difference.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  I think that many disabled people felt disregarded and ignored under the Conservative Government. We will be working with disabled people and the organisations that represent them on many—not all—aspects of what I have announced today. If the hon. Lady has particular issues and concerns that she would like to raise, she can write to me, or I would be very happy for her to meet me or the Minister for Social Security and Disability.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  No.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  Many other Members have asked that question. We will publish the equality impact and poverty impact analyses alongside the spring statement. I believe that we need to treat people with dignity, respect and compassion, but must also face up to the challenges of a failing system that is currently not sustainable, not for the public finances—although that is relevant—but for the very people who will depend on this in future. That is what we are trying to change.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  I take the issues relating to the measures I have announced today very seriously. We want to ensure that all the assessment processes and training are properly scrutinised, and we are overhauling our safeguarding processes. My objective is to improve the lives and life chances of sick and disabled people by supporting into work those who can work, and by protecting those who will never work, through switching off reassessments to give them dignity and respect. I believe that the mission to ensure that those who can work do, and to secure the sustainability of the social security system for the long term, is the responsibility of the Labour party that founded the welfare state.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  I can absolutely give that commitment. Many hon. Members have raised the issue of culture, which is about how people feel they have been treated and the headlines that they see in the papers. It is really important that we change that. I know that we cannot do so overnight, but the entire team in the DWP—our Ministers and officials—want to change things so that we can get people on a pathway to success.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  I can confirm that we will focus PIP on those with the greatest needs by changing the assessment so that people will need to score a minimum of four points to qualify for the daily living component. That will apply to new claimants from November 2026. Reassessments will be conducted on a personal, case-by-case basis, and therefore, while I entirely understand why Members raise issues about individuals, we cannot determine those cases from the Dispatch Box.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  I am really sorry to hear about what has happened to the hon. Gentleman’s constituent and his family, and the impact it had on them. There is absolutely more that we need to do to provide local support, which is why the Get Britain Working plan is not all being determined by Whitehall. Local leaders know best what local areas need, which is why we are devolving more resources, powers and responsibilities to local areas to ensure that we shift the focus towards prevention and early intervention and help people get back on their feet.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  Unless we cut waiting times and waiting lists in the NHS, people cannot get back to health and back to work—many employers have said to me that they are deeply concerned about that—and that is the reason we are investing an extra £26 billion into the NHS. We are dealing with precisely those key sectors—health and social care, construction and so on—where employers want people with the skills to do those jobs. We are overhauling our approach in DWP and setting up sector-based work academy programmes specifically tailored to employers’ needs. I know there is more we need to do to work with employers and help them get people back into work, and that is what this Government will deliver.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  Spending on working-age sickness and disability benefits will still rise substantially over the current Parliament. The full assessment of the numbers affected, and by how much, will be published alongside the spring statement.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  We are considering putting jobcentres into GP surgeries and community centres. I believe in a jobs and careers service going to where people are, rather than always expecting them to come to us. I think I am right in saying that authorities in some parts of the country, such as the combined authority in Manchester, have commissioned specific talking therapies for people who are looking for work. That is the direction in which we want to move, and I should be more than happy to discuss it with my hon. Friend in more detail.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  Full details on the impact of these changes on the block grant will be available at the spring statement. The last Budget provided the biggest ever block grant settlement since devolution. I will be working closely with my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and the Northern Ireland Executive to make sure we do everything possible to help people in Northern Ireland into work and off benefits, to ensure that they have the same chances and choices as people right across the United Kingdom.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  Our Keep Britain Working review, led by the former John Lewis boss Sir Charlie Mayfield, is dealing with precisely that issue: what more we can do to help employers to give sick and disabled people more opportunities to obtain work and stay in work.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  I thank my hon. Friend for her response. We will publish the equality and poverty impact analyses alongside the spring statement. I know that she is a lifelong champion of sick and disabled people, and she has rightly raised concerns, including through the Select Committee, of vital issues such as safeguarding. I look forward to receiving the Select Committee’s report on that in order to learn from the evidence that it received. Although this is a substantial package with those estimated savings, spending on working-age sickness and disability benefits will continue to rise over this Parliament. The last forecast was that they would continue to rise by £18 billion. As she says, these are important issues, and we need to work to get this right to ensure that proper support is in place for people. I genuinely look forward to working with the Select Committee to get all these proposals right.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  This Government are ambitious for our people and our country. We believe that unleashing the talents of the British people is the key to our future success. But the social security system that we inherited from the Conservatives is failing the very people that it is supposed to help and is holding our country back. The facts speak for themselves. One in 10 people of working age are now claiming a sickness or disability benefit. Almost 1 million young people are not in education, employment or training—one in eight of all our young people. Some 2.8 million are out of work due to long-term sickness, and the number of people claiming personal independence payments is set to double this decade from 2 million to 4.3 million, with the growth in claims rising faster among young people and those with mental health conditions. Claims are up to four times higher in parts of the midlands, Wales and the north where economic demand is weakest. These places were decimated in the ’80s and ’90s, written off for years by successive Tory Governments and never given the chances that they deserved. The consequences of that failure are there for all to see. Millions of people who could work are trapped on benefits, denied the income, hope, dignity and self-respect that we know that good work brings. Taxpayers are paying millions more for the cost of failure, with spending on working-age sickness and disability benefits up £20 billion since the pandemic, and set to rise by a further £18 billion by the end of this Parliament to £70 billion a year. It is not like this in most other comparable countries, where spending on these benefits since the pandemic is either stable or falling, while ours continues to inexorably rise. That is the legacy of 14 years of Tory failure. Today, we say, “No more”. Since we were elected we have hit the ground running to get more people into good work through our plan for change. We are investing an extra £26 billion into the NHS to drive down waiting lists and get people back to health and back to work. We are improving the quality of work and making work pay with our landmark employment rights legislation and increases in the national living wage; we are creating more good jobs in every part of the country in clean energy and through our modern industrial strategy; and we are introducing the biggest reforms to employment support in a generation, with our £240 million Get Britain Working plan. Today, our pathways to work Green Paper sets out decisive action to fix the broken benefits system, creating a more proactive, pro-work system for those who can work and so protecting those who cannot work, now and for the long term. As a constituency MP for 14 years, I know that there will always be people who can never work because of the severity of their disability or illness. Under this Government, the social security system will always be there for people in genuine need. That is a principle we will never compromise on. Disabled people and people with health conditions who can work, however, should have the same rights, choices and chances to work as everybody else. That principle of equality is vital too, because, far from what Conservative Members would have us believe, many sick and disabled people want to work, with the right help and support. Unlike the Conservatives, that is what we will deliver. Our first aim is to secure a decisive shift towards prevention and early intervention. Almost 4 million people are in work with a work-limiting health condition and around 300,000 fall out of work every year. We have to do far more to help people stay in work and get back to work quickly, because their chances of returning are five times higher in the first year. Our plans to give statutory sick pay to 1 million of the lowest-paid workers and provide more rights to flexible working will help keep more people in work. The WorkWell programme is trialling new approaches, such as GPs referring people to employment advisers instead of signing them off sick. Our Keep Britain Working review, led by former John Lewis boss Sir Charlie Mayfield, will set out what Government and employers can do together to create healthier, more inclusive workplaces. We will therefore help more employers to offer opportunities for disabled people, including through measures such as reasonable readjustments, alongside our Green Paper consultation on reforming Access to Work so it is fit for the future. Today, I can announce another step. Our Green Paper will consult on a major reform of contributory benefits, merging contributions-based jobseeker’s allowance and employment support allowance into a new time-limited unemployment insurance paid at a higher rate, without someone having to prove that they cannot work in order to get it. Therefore, if someone has paid into the system, they will get stronger income protection while we help them get back on track. Our second objective is to restore trust and fairness in the benefits system by fixing the broken assessment process and tackling the perverse incentives that drive people into welfare dependency. Labour Members have long argued that the work capability assessment is not fit for purpose. Going through the WCA is complex, time-consuming and often stressful for claimants, especially if they also have to go through the PIP assessment. More fundamentally, it is based on a binary can-or-cannot-work divide, when we know that the truth is that many people’s physical and mental health conditions fluctuate. The consultation on the Conservatives’ discredited WCA proposals was ruled unlawful by the courts. I can therefore announce today that we will not go ahead with their proposals. Instead, we will scrap the WCA in 2028. In future, extra financial support for health conditions in universal credit will be available solely through the PIP assessment. Extra income is therefore based on the impact of someone’s health condition or disability and not on their capacity to work, reducing the number of assessments that people have to go through and providing a vital step towards derisking work. And we will do more, by legislating for a right to try, guaranteeing that work in and of itself will never lead to a benefit reassessment and giving people the confidence to take the plunge and try work without the fear that that will put their benefits at risk. We will also tackle the perverse financial incentives that the Tories created, which actively encourage people into welfare dependency. They ran down the value of the universal credit standard allowance. As a result, the health top-up is now worth double the standard allowance, at more than £400 a month. In 2017, they took away extra financial help for the group of people who could prepare for work, so we are left with a binary assessment of whether people can or cannot work, and there is a clear financial incentive for someone to define themselves as incapable of work—a factor the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Institute for Fiscal Studies and others say is likely to be driving people on to incapacity benefits. Today, we tackle this problem head-on. We will legislate to rebalance the payments in universal credit from April next year, fixing the value of the health top-up in cash terms for existing claimants and reducing it for new claimants, with an additional premium for people with severe, lifelong conditions that mean they will never work, to give them the financial security they deserve. Alongside that, we will bring in a permanent, above-inflation rise to the standard allowance in universal credit for the first time ever. This means a £775 annual increase in cash terms by 2029-30, and it is a decisive step to tackle the perverse incentives in the system. We will also fix the failing system of reassessments. The Conservatives failed to switch reassessments back on after the pandemic, so they are now down by more than two thirds, and face-to-face assessments have gone from seven in 10 to only one in 10. We will turn these reassessments back on at scale, shift the focus back to doing more face-to-face, and ensure that they are recorded as standard, to give confidence to claimants and taxpayers that they are being done properly. I can also announce that, for people on universal credit with the most severe disabilities and health conditions that will never improve, we want to ensure that they are never reassessed, in order to give them the confidence and dignity they deserve. We will also fundamentally overhaul the Department for Work and Pensions’ safeguarding approach to make sure that all our processes and training are of the highest quality, so that we protect and support the most vulnerable people. Alongside these changes we will also reform disability benefits so that they focus support on those in greatest need and ensure that the social security system lasts for the long term into the future. Social and demographic change means that more people are now living with a disability, but the increase in disability benefits is double the rate of increasing prevalence of working-age disability in the country: claims among young people are up 150%; claims for mental health conditions are up 190%; and claims for learning difficulties are up by over 400%, according to the IFS. Every day there are more than 1,000 new PIP awards. That is the equivalent of adding a population the size of Leicester every single year. That is not sustainable in the long term, above all for the people who depend on that support, but the Tories had no proper plan to deal with it—just yet more ill-thought-through consultations. So today I can announce that this Government will not bring in the Tory proposals for vouchers, because disabled people should have choice and control over their lives. We will not means-test PIP, because disabled people deserve extra support, whatever their incomes, and I can confirm that we will not freeze PIP either. Instead, our reforms will focus support on those with the greatest needs. We will legislate for a change in PIP so that people will need to score a minimum of four points in at least one activity to qualify for the daily living element of PIP from November 2026. That will not affect the mobility component of PIP and relates only to the daily living element. Alongside that, we will launch a review of the PIP assessment, led by my right hon. Friend the Minister for Social Security and Disability, in close consultation with disabled people, the organisations that represent them and other experts, so that we can ensure that PIP and the assessment process are fit for purpose now and into the future. This significant reform package is expected to save over £5 billion in 2029-30; the OBR will set out its final assessment of the costings next week. Our third and final objective is to deliver personalised support to sick and disabled people who can work so that they can get the jobs they need and deserve. We know from the last Labour Government’s new deal for disabled people, young people and the long-term unemployed the difference that proper employment support can make. More recent evidence from the Work Choice programme and additional work coach time shows that support can make a significant difference in the number of people getting and keeping work and improving their mental health and wellbeing. This Labour Government believe that an active state can transform people’s lives. We know that because we have done it before. Today I can announce that we will invest an additional £1 billion a year in employment support, with the aim of guaranteeing high-quality, tailored and personalised support to help people on a pathway to work—the largest ever investment in opportunities to work for sick and disabled people. Alongside that, for those on the UC health top-up, we will bring in an expectation to engage and a new support conversation to talk about people’s goals and aspirations, combined with an offer of personalised health, skills and employment support. We will go further, because being out of work or training is so damaging for young people’s future prospects. In addition to funding our youth guarantee through the £240 million Get Britain Working plan, we will consult on delaying access to the health top-up in universal credit until someone is aged 22, reinvesting the savings into work support and training opportunities, so that every young person is earning or learning and on a pathway to success. The Conservatives left a broken benefits system that is failing the people who depend on it and our country as a whole. The status quo is unacceptable, but it is not inevitable. We were elected on a mandate for change to end the sticking-plaster approach and tackle the root causes of problems in this country, which have been ignored for too long. We believe in the value and potential of every single person: we all have something positive to contribute and can make a difference, whether that is in paid work, in our families or in our communities alongside our neighbours and friends. We will unleash potential in every corner of the land, because we are as ambitious for the British people as they are for themselves. Today we take decisive action, and I commend this statement to the House.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  Welsh Labour wants to see more people having the chances and choices to get good jobs. That is why we have a modern industrial strategy to create good jobs in every part of the country, why we are building 1.5 million new homes and why we want to see clean energy support. All those things will make a huge difference. We do not believe that the status quo is acceptable or inevitable. That is why our plan for change will create more good jobs in every part of the country. I hope that the hon. Lady and her party will welcome that.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  Absolutely—that is very important for me personally and for the Government as a whole. We want people in Scotland to have the same chances and choices to work if they can as everybody else and to make sure people have proper protections. That is essential for us, and I will continue to work closely with the Scottish Government, as I know other Departments will.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  We are focusing precisely on the root causes. We are focusing on what more we can do to change the world of work, get people back to health and back to work and give them the skills that they need, and on tackling the disincentives in the benefits system. I am not interested in tinkering around; it is too important for people, and life is short. I want to get it right, tackle the root causes, and put the country on a pathway to success.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend raises a really important point, and it would be really good if she talked to my right hon. Friend the Minister for Social Security and Disability, who is reviewing universal credit, as we promised in our manifesto, to tackle poverty and make work pay. We have to make that a reality for everybody in this country, and I am sure that, if she talks to him, he will speak more about what we are doing in this regard.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  There is very clear evidence that good work is good for mental health. That is the case for people with anxiety and depression, but also for those with more severe conditions such as psychosis and schizophrenia. There is really clear evidence from the NHS individual placement and support programme that if we can help people get into work, that is not only better for them and their incomes, but it reduces their relapses and spending on the NHS. The right hon. Gentleman asks how I rationalise this; I do so because I am not prepared to accept a system that is miserable for people, that traps them in poverty, and that denies them the chances and support they deserve. I am also not prepared to accept an inexorable rise in costs and spending, much of which is on the costs of failure, precisely because I want to ensure that the social security system lasts for the long term.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  My hon. Friend is right: there are more disabled people in work than ever before, and we need to recognise that and go further. We are launching a consultation on Access to Work to ensure that more people are able to secure that vital support, and that it goes to the right place at the right time.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  The hon. Lady may not know, but we have a fraud Bill going through Parliament right now, because we believe that £8 billion being wasted on fraud every single year is unacceptable. I am more than happy to write to her to set out the contents of that Bill; we can then have another discussion.

• 18 Mar 2025 · Welfare Reform · Hansard source

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  I am happy for the hon. Gentleman to write to me about that constituent so I can look at the issue.