Sir Keir Starmer has been urged to protect disabled people claiming welfare payments from expected cuts to the benefits system.
The health and disability-related benefits bill is now £65bn a year and projected to increase to £100bn over the next four years, with research suggesting rising levels of mental ill health are behind the figures.
The government is identifying cuts to the welfare budget ahead of the Spring Statement, with the PM working to rally MPs to support the move.
Sir Keir was challenged at PMQs by Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey and Labour’s Richard Burgon, who said disabled people were “frightened” and suggested “the moral thing to do” would be to introduce a wealth tax.
Expected cuts could fall on Personal Independent Payments (PIP), which provides help with extra living costs to those with a long-term physical or mental health condition, and cuts to incapacity benefits for people unable to work and receiving Universal Credit (UC).
Speaking at PMQs, Sir Ed asked the prime minister to confirm that disability benefits for people who cannot work would not be cut.
Sir Keir said: “We will of course support those who need support, but help those who can work into work. They’ll be the guiding principles.”
Later, Labour MP Burgon said that when disabled people “hear the language of tough choices… it means the easy option of of making the poor and vulnerable people pay”, and said the “courageous” thing to do would be to introduce a wealth tax.
Sir Keir responded that the Conservatives had “locked millions out of work” and there was “a moral imperative” to “help those who want to work to get back into work”.
On a wealth tax, he added: “We have raised money, the energy profits levy, taxing non-doms, and air passenger duty on private jets, but this isn’t a bottomless pit and must kickstart growth to get the economic stability that we need.”
Labour MPs have been called in to 10 Downing Street to discuss the changes,
Bassetlaw MP Jo White, who represents the so-called Red Wall MPs, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme there was “a moral duty to change people’s lives”.
“It’s a generational thing – if families are out of work they tend to bring up their children to exist on the benefits system,” she said.
“People slide along on that low level of income, perhaps dipping into the black market, but their aspirations are so low and the communities do not change.”
Tackling this issue through changing the welfare system “is absolutely critical”, White argued, because in order to ” lift people out of poverty… they need to be in work”.
But significant numbers of Labour colleagues are unhappy. Nottingham East MP Nadia Whittome told the BBC her party was “getting it badly wrong on this”.
“We cannot go back” to the “narrative of strivers versus skivers”, she said.
Asked if she would rebel over the issue, Whittome said: “I was on these benefits – my mum had to stop work when I was a teenager to care for me.
“I represent disabled people, all of us do, and we all hear their stories every day and just how scared they are about this and what a difference these payments make to their lives.
“I can’t look my constituents in the eye, I can’t look my mum in the eye, and support this.”
Many Labour MPs who spoke to the BBC have said they agreed many people currently on disability benefits could work and should.
But they worried the government’s rumoured plans, such as freezing Personal Independence Payments, would punish all those on disability benefits, including those with severe disabilities who could never work.
That would be “unforgivable”, one MP told the BBC.
Another said making it more difficult to access disability payments was “not what the Labour party ought to be about”.
“It’s our very DNA that Labour was created to lift people out of difficult circumstances,” they said.
“The government needs to stop talking about everyone who is on disability benefits as if they are all the same because they are not,” said another.
In the UK 1.3m people now claim disability benefits primarily for mental health or behavioural conditions – 44% of all claimants, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) found.
Exploring the reasons behind the rise, which has “accelerated” since the pandemic, researchers said the UK was an outlier compared to other countries, none of which have seen the same level of post-pandemic increases in health-related benefit claims.
More than half of the rise in 16 to 64-year-olds claiming disability benefits since the pandemic is for claims relating to mental health or behavioural conditions, according to a report from the IFS.
Researchers found particularly fast growth in new disability benefit claims for learning disability and autism spectrum claims.
There was also evidence of increasing levels of severe mental health problems.
There is a heightened rate of mortality among working age people, due to “deaths of despair”- either by suicide, alcohol or drug misuse – and such deaths are much more likely if someone has a mental health illness.
Trades Union Congress (TUC) general secretary Paul Nowak said slashing welfare for disabled people would “only make the current challenges worse”.
He urged Labour not to cut PIP, which he said enables many disabled people to access work rather than relying on benefits, but he backed reforms to a “one-size-fits all approach” towards one that provides tailored employment support.
“Trade unions share the government’s ambitions to improve the nation’s health and to help more people into good quality work,” he said.
“A major lesson from the Tory years is that austerity damaged the nation’s health – we must not make the same mistake again.”
