On 26 March, Labour Chancellor Rachel Reeves confirmed the most draconian attack on health-related benefits since the austerity measures of the Con-Dem coalition government of 2010. The changes in Personal Independence Payments (PIP) and the Incapacity Benefit element of Universal Credit (UC) – trailed in the Green Paper of Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall a week earlier – will leave more than three million people worse off and plunge a further 250,000 people, 50,000 of them children, into poverty. This ruthless raid on the benefits paid to some of the most vulnerable sections of the working class is designed to slash state welfare spending by £5bn and corrall even more people into dead-end, casualised and poorly paid jobs. Once again it is the working class that is paying the price for capitalism’s intractable crisis.
The measures will:
- Make it harder for most people with disabilities to access the daily living component of PIPs, a benefit supposed to provide help with additional costs, whether in or out of work. All but those with the most severe conditions will face more frequent assessments. PIP assessments involve questions about tasks like preparing and eating food, washing and getting dressed. Each is scored on a scale from zero by a health professional. From November 2026, to qualify for the payment people will need to score at least four points for one activity. For example, needing help to wash your hair, or your body below the waist, would be awarded two points, but needing help to wash between the shoulders and waist would equate to four points. 3.7 million people currently rely on PIP.
- Freeze the Incapacity Benefit component of UC at £97 per week for existing claimants from April next year, failing to keep pace with inflation. For new claimants, the amount paid will be reduced to £50 per week. 2.25 million current UC recipients face an average loss of £500 a year, while it is estimated 730,000 future UC recipients will lose an average of £3,000 per year.
- Completely remove Incapacity Benefit for those aged under 22, in a ruthless attempt to force young people with health-related disabilities into spurious work and training schemes. Health minister Wes Streeting, in a contemptuous dig at those suffering from mental health conditions, claimed this would prevent ‘over-diagnosis’.
These changes, as well as the scrapping of the hated Work and Capability Assessment, mirror proposals made last year by the outgoing Conservative government. The Department for Work and Pensions’ own impact assessment accepts that about 3.2m people will lose out financially from these changes, losing on average £1,720 a year. These cuts will hit the most vulnerable hardest. 50% of people currently receiving either PIP or the health-related component of Universal Credit for those too ill to work – which includes those who are terminally ill, receiving treatment for cancer, or are pregnant – are either in debt, unable to heat their homes, or struggling to afford food for themselves and their children. 24% of 16-64 year-olds in families receiving health-related benefits have had to use a foodbank in the last year, compared with 3% in the general population. The changes come at a time when newly-released figures show child poverty in Britain has once again broken records, with 4.45 million children – or 31% of all children in the country – living in poverty in the year to March 2024. Meanwhile, the Labour government categorically refuses to scrap the two-child benefit limit or the overall benefit cap, the single biggest drivers of child poverty.
The massive rise in health-related benefit claims over the last few years comes in the context of the increasing inability of the health service to meet the needs of the working class. There has been an upsurge in young people experiencing work-limiting health conditions since the Covid-19 pandemic, resulting from a mental health crisis fuelled by cuts to health, housing and other services. Britain spends on average less on health than comparable countries. Britain has substantially fewer key physical resources than many of its peers, including hospital beds and key clinical staff. The result of this under-funded health and education system in a society centred on the exploitation of labour means that current incapacity and disability benefits for working-age adults are expected to rise to £70bn in five years’ time. The aim of Chancellor Reeves was not to improve support for those damaged by society but to cut spending back, while peddling the old divisive tropes about those unable to work constituting an undeserving section of the working class. As Rachel Reeves has said on several occasions, ‘We are the party of working people. The clue is in the name’.
To this end, the Fraud, Error and Recovery Bill has been introduced by Labour to give the Department of Work and Pensions increased power to spy on benefit recipients’ bank transactions and to take money directly from their accounts if they are suspected of claiming fraudulently. The fact that in the financial year ending in 2024, just 2.8% of government spending on overpayments was due to fraud demonstrates that the bill is not concerned with protecting public finances, but with intimidating and punishing the working class.
Contrary to the protestations of Labour former frontbenchers, Ed Balls and Diane Abbott, that cutting benefits is ‘not a Labour thing to do,’ their party has always acted to repress workers on behalf of capital. This has been true from the time of Labour’s first prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, who in 1931 oversaw cuts of £76 million including 10% from unemployment insurance. Now as then, the Labour Party is a profoundly anti-working class party. The only response must be to organise against its savage austerity measures and refuse to pay for the state’s crisis of profitability. Immediately following Kendall’s announcement, protests were called by grassroots groups including Crips Against Cuts and Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC). We can and must fight back against this brutal attack on the working class.
Felix Lancashire and James Martin
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 305 April/May 2025
