This is Jenrick’s article in today’s Torygraph which sets out Reform’s policy on PIP :
Dumping young people on welfare isn’t compassion, it’s neglect
Reform has a detailed plan to fix the benefits system to save billions and ensure the right help reaches the right people
It is a strange perversion of compassion to tell a young man with anxiety that he is beyond work.
Work – structure, purpose, the company of others – is precisely what recovery from anxiety requires. Yet, in Labour’s first year in office, almost 250 people received benefits for anxiety or mood disorders every single day.
A few weeks ago, I met one of them.
Twenty-three-years-old, he lives on a Newark housing estate in his childhood bedroom.
A little under two years ago, he was struggling frankly with routine and adult responsibility but also his mental health. He was signed off sick from his first proper job. Shortly after, he got a letter confirming he didn’t need to look for another job, and money began arriving. Nobody from the state has telephoned since.
His mental health has grown much worse. In short, he had no plans, no hope, and little thought for the future. I asked whether he was happier when he was working or now? He paused, sighed, and admitted life was much better before.
Like many, he had not chosen this life, not really. But now he was living it; any alternative seemed impossible.
Multiply him by millions, and you have the moral and economic catastrophe we face in our country today.
Some 6.9 million people are now entitled to receive disability benefits – 2.5 million more than 20 years ago. More than 20,000 join the Personal Independence Payment caseload each month, and two-thirds of those who began claiming in 2017 were still claiming five years later.
By 2031, health and disability benefits will cost £110bn a year: £3,600 for every family in the country. This is not an epidemic of broken backs and lost limbs. Since 2002, the share of working-age people claiming for mental and behavioural conditions has tripled.
This is not generosity. It is suicidal empathy.
Nor is it what the welfare state meant to be. William Beveridge, architect of the post-war welfare state, called “idleness” one of the five great giant evils the system was meant to tackle.
And yet, our political class pussyfoots around tackling the problem for fear of the backlash – it’s pure cynicism.
To me it’s a moral crisis. And it needs to change. In the words of Beveridge, this is “a time for revolutions, not for patching”.
And yet, for 10 years, ministers of both parties have patched and patched and patched again. The Government’s own review concedes that PIP no longer works; yet when Labour attempted even modest savings last summer, its backbenchers forced ministers to gut their own bill within days.
The Conservatives, who presided over most of this growth, now propose to trim it at the edges. Their ideas are paper thin, literally – two pages, that could have been written on the back of a fag packet. It’s tragic that this emergency is being neglected in this way.
Nigel Farage and I are not prepared to do that.
Robert Jenrick said he and Nigel Farage will ‘save the welfare state, and we’ll do it by revolutionising it’ Credit: Peter Nicholls
On Monday, Reform will publish Making Welfare Work: a 50-page plan for the most comprehensive redesign of the welfare system’s machinery in a generation.
The scale is enormous.
The Coalition’s welfare savings under Iain Duncan Smith, then regarded as the outer limit of political possibility, totalled £20.5bn. The Conservatives today propose £23bn.
Our changes – which go far beyond disability benefits – are more than double that.
£22bn of our reforms take the form of changes to the disability programme alone.
Each of them has that young man in my constituency in mind.
Under our plan, he would not be on benefits.
Rather, under our Return to Work Cover, he’d still be connected to his employer, who would have a strong economic incentive to return him to work. It is based on the Dutch system, where applications for disability benefits fell by 40 per cent.
If he didn’t return to work within two years, he’d go through a single, rigorous Disability Needs Assessment, which would replace today’s overlapping web of failing tests. Conducted in person, by clinicians, it would screen out vexatious and fraudulent claims.
And, for those with lower-level conditions, rather than a cheque, they’d get help. Cash payments for low-level conditions will end and be replaced with Disability Support Accounts, run by local councils and mayors.
These will cover the verified additional costs of lower-level forms of disability – from equipment and adaptations to transport and personal assistance.
Services can be tailored to local needs. There can be innovation. How services are provided in Herefordshire need not match Haringey.
Meanwhile, Health Security Allowance, a new form of regularly reviewed payment, will continue to support the gravely ill and severely challenged. Let me be very clear, we will never let down those who need it. In fact, these changes secure the system for those who deserve it for decades to come.
I’m not going to sit by and watch
We will not pretend this is painless. Existing claimants will be reassessed over three to four years: we estimate that 2.16 million will keep their present cash entitlement in full, while 2.89 million will see theirs modified or withdrawn, concentrated where recent growth has been most explosive.
And because the objective is recovery rather than warehousing, we will invest an extra £1.85bn a year in talking therapies, physiotherapy and employment support.
The aim? To end the era in which fewer than one in a hundred Universal Credit health claimants now moves into a job each month.
Growing up in Wolverhampton amidst the dislocation and deindustrialisation of the Black Country, I saw why the welfare state matters. Why it’s needed.
Why we owe an obligation to those in desperate need. Why, when hard times hit, the state must be there to support people through it.
But dumping our young people onto welfare isn’t compassion; it’s neglect.
We are not lifting people out of misfortune. We are abandoning them to it, and calling it kindness.
Unlike the other parties, I’m not going to sit by and watch. Now, we stop patching. Britain is broken, but it can be fixed with real change.
We’ll save the welfare state, and we’ll do it by revolutionising it.