Helen Whately is Shadow Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and the MP for Faversham and Mid Kent

Labour got two things right in their much-trailed welfare reforms last week. The bill is too high, and the system is broken.

Apart from these statements of fact, it was the worst of all worlds.

For a start, the endless briefing and speculation was alarming for disabled people.  For weeks they watched Liz Kendall spin her giant policy wheel and brief out a new plan to journalists, gauging how each would land with them and her own backbenches.

Then, when the government finally did announce something, it amounted to little more than penny-pinching and tinkering round the edges. In the end they skimmed £5 billion from a sickness benefits bill forecast to rise to over £100 billon by the end of the decade.

Now, there are some basic principles that I think most people would agree our welfare system should be based on.

Firstly, that everyone who can work, should work. It is not up to hardworking taxpayers to fund the lives of people who could be supporting themselves.

At the same time, through no fault of their own, some people do genuinely need help. Whether that’s because of a lifelong disability, or because they’re recovering from an illness or accident. These people deserve dignity and support from a system which works.

The million-dollar question – or rather as it has become, the 100-billion-pound question – is who should fall into which category?

This stuff is complicated, but it’s well worth understanding if you want to know why the current system isn’t working.

Sickness benefits come in two main kinds.

First, are the benefits we pay to people who can’t work.

The journey onto these incapacity benefits starts at the doctors’, where in a 10-minute appointment a GP will assess whether someone’s condition prevents them from working. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the pressure that GPs are under and the lack of incentive to do otherwise, 94% of these ‘FIT notes’ are handed over saying that the person isn’t fit for any work at all.

If you then want to receive benefits, you go through what’s called a Work Capability Assessment (WCA). This currently funnels two-thirds of people onto the highest rate of benefits – on which you don’t need to consider engaging with work or any form of training.

Around 2,000 people are being signed onto these benefits every single day. The heartbreaking truth, especially with a low reassessment rate, is that very few people ever come off them. And there are now 1.8 million people on these essentially ‘never-work-again’ benefits.

Now if you have a lifelong debilitating health condition, that makes sense. But we are increasingly signing young people onto these benefits because of things like anxiety.

When we came out of the pandemic and saw what was happening, we introduced reforms to the FIT note and planned to scrap the WCA entirely in 2026-27. Labour have already ditched our FIT note reforms, and their big idea last week was… to delay the WCA scrapping until 2028.

The other kind of sickness benefits are those that we give people to help them cover the additional costs of living with a health condition.

These Personal Independence Payments (PIP) are not means tested, and you can receive them even if you’re in work. The idea is that someone with, for example, cerebral palsy, might be able to live a full and independent life – including working – if the state helped to cover some of the additional costs they incur because of their condition.

In principle, this is a good thing. But what we have seen in recent years is a claim rate rising beyond anything we can reasonably afford. This is in part driven by a huge rise in the number of claims for mental ill health (now the single most common condition claimed for), and a rise in the number of young people claiming.

At its most egregious, this can result in someone with ADHD qualifying for a brand-new government-funded BMW under the Motability scheme. And don’t get me wrong, I recognise that ADHD can make life much harder, but none of the people I’ve spoken to with ADHD has suggested that a new taxpayer funded car is the answer.

Again, coming out of the pandemic we saw where this was going. We launched a consultation on how you could fix it – which looked at various ways to change the PIP system, including alternatives to cash payments and making it harder for people with mental health conditions to receive financial support unless they have clear, additional costs related to their condition.

The option Labour plumped for this week was, surprise surprise, the one with the fastest savings.

That’s because this week the Chancellor will deliver her emergency Budget. After taxing jobs and spending an extra £70 billion a year, growth has been forecast down, government borrowing costs have increased and her headroom appears to have been entirely wiped out.

Last week’s announcements were all about scoring savings with the OBR to help Rachel get her figures to add up. Keir Starmer talked about the moral case, but given the choices they made, sadly that was just window dressing.

And there’s a second reason that they have rushed these reforms and ended up tinkering with a broken system.

It’s that they didn’t do any real thinking in opposition. Their new ministers walked into the DWP and asked officials what they should do. And officials, as well they might, presented them with a list of the existing thinking on the matter.

This is a big, existential question about the future of our society. Who can we afford to support, and who must we insist pays their own way? The only thing we know for certain, is the mathematics of the current system simply do not add up.

There are so many important and interesting questions that need to be answered.

Is the rise in economic inactivity a reflection of worsening public health, or does it also signal a shift in attitudes toward work, disability, and long-term illness?

What is going on for example, with the rise in people claiming benefits for their mental health. Why is UK an outlier to other European countries on this issue?

Is this all a matter of perverse incentives, which if ironed out would have people back to work in an instant? Or is something more structural at play?

Why are 5.3 million people on out of work benefits when there are 1.2 million job vacancies?

Does our welfare system penalise those who want to work and save?

These and so many other questions the Government’s green paper doesn’t even attempt to answer.

We are not going to make the same mistake with our time in opposition.

Last week Kemi Badenoch launched the most significant Conservative policy review in 50 years, to properly look at these sorts of questions, with think tanks, businesses, charities and individuals from across the country.

We want big ideas. We want original thinking. We want to hear from people with different backgrounds, personal experience and expertise.

Government is not an end in itself. It’s what you do with it that matters.  Few things can matter more for our future than fixing this problem. And all Conservatives can help with that.

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