Labour’s controversial shakeup of the welfare system risks causing “chaos” for vulnerable families and adding to the burden of overstretched local services, a North East council leader has warned.
The Government has come under heavy criticism this week after confirming plans to save more than £5 billion a year by 2030, with an estimated one million disabled people expected to lose their benefits.
That crackdown will include measures like tightening the eligibility for personal independence payments (Pip), while those aged under 22 could be denied access to the health top-up in universal credit.
Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall has said the changes would create a “pro-work” system and that the existing benefits regime was “failing the very people that it is supposed to help and is holding our country back.”
But there have been widespread concerns that the reforms risk pushing disabled people and their families into deeper poverty, particularly in more deprived regions like the North East.
Gateshead Council leader Martin Gannon told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that the impact of the changes would also increase pressure on other public services.
The Labour cllr said: “You can cut the national welfare bill, but you don’t actually cut the bill. It causes chaos and causes family breakdown, which increases the cost – not just to local authorities, but to the judicial system, police, probation, social workers, hospitals. It is just not cost effective in my opinion.
“It is a real challenge for the Government and I accept that, I understand the challenges they are under. But if they are going to control the escalating costs of welfare they have to do it in a cleverer way than seems to be the case at the present time.”
Cllr Gannon said he could “understand that the Government has concerns about the welfare bill rising”, but that local councils were still having to find ways to cope with escalating bills for adult social care and looked-after children that were a “direct result” of austerity policies.
He added: “Anything which would decrease the income of really vulnerable families and individuals in Gateshead does not have a zero impact. The last thing we need is to get into a situation where the Government saves money because they are concerned about the sustainability of a £100 billion welfare budget, only for that cost to just be pushed down.
“Local authorities are in a position where we are already barely sustainable carrying the burdens of adult social care.”
North East mayor Kim McGuinness called on Wednesday for ministers to scrap the two-child benefit cap, saying she was concerned that children with disabled parents could face further hardship as a result of the welfare changes.
Beth Farhat, chair of the North East Child Poverty Commission, added: “It’s hard to see how cutting the support disabled people receive – including for older young people – squares with the Government’s pledges to tackle child poverty and to end mass dependence on emergency food parcels. Measures that could push families into even deeper poverty risk completely undermining these welcome commitments.”
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said:“We inherited a fundamentally broken welfare system from the previous government. It does not work for the people it is supposed to support, businesses who need workers or taxpayers who foot the bill.
“This government will always protect the most severely disabled people to live with dignity. But we’re not prepared to stand back and do nothing while millions of people – especially young people – who have potential to work and live independent lives, instead become trapped out of work and abandoned by the system. It would be morally bankrupt to let their life chances waste away.”
