British PM says soaring disability payments ‘devastating’

LONDON: Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Wednesday said the country’s soaring disability costs are “devastating for the public finances”, one day after the Labour government announced cuts of £5 billion ($6.5 billion).

Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall on Tuesday unveiled a “significant reform package” to help disabled people into work — but some Labour MPs and charities hit out at the changes that notably included how claimants are assessed.

“By 2030 we are projected to spend £70 billion a year on working-age incapacity and disability benefits alone,” Starmer wrote in Wednesday’s edition of The Times newspaper.

“But more importantly it has wreaked a terrible human cost. Young people shut out of the labour market at a formative age. People with complex long-term conditions, written off by a single assessment.”

Kendall said that annual savings of £5 billion would be achieved from the end of the decade.

Starmer pointed to the 2.8 million working-age people out of work owing to long-term sickness, calling it a “damning indictment” of the previous Conservative government’s record on welfare.

The PM, whose Labour party won a general election in July, added that “people who want to return to work, yet can’t access the support they need” was “happening at scale and it is indefensible”.

Kendall’s welfare reform focused on narrowing eligibility for the Personal Independence Payment — a benefit aimed at helping the disabled.

A total 3.66 million people were entitled to PIP in England and Wales at the end of January, official data revealed Tuesday.

That was up 71 percent compared with before the Covid pandemic.

Kendall said there were more than 1,000 new PIP awards every day.

Tuesday’s contested announcement comes after the government recently said it would hike spending on defence, heaping fresh pressure on government coffers in the face of high borrowing costs.

-AFP