The plan included an increase in mental health services, more stringent assessments of people’s ability to work and tougher rules for people who refuse to take up suitable jobs….reports Asian Lite News
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party, facing an election next month, on Saturday announced details of its plan to tighten sickness benefit rules, which it said would eventually save 12 billion pounds ($15.3 billion) a year.
Sunak, who has previously said he wants to change welfare rules to counter a rise in people dropping out of the workforce, said his reforms represented “a moral mission” as well as a way to help fix the public finances.
The plan included an increase in mental health services, more stringent assessments of people’s ability to work and tougher rules for people who refuse to take up suitable jobs.
The changes would save taxpayers 12 billion pounds a year in welfare spending by the end of the next parliament, which is due to run until 2029, the Conservatives said.
However, the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent think tank, said many of the planned changes were already baked into existing fiscal projections.
IFS Associate Director Tom Waters said the biggest new proposal was one aimed at reducing the number of people able to receive benefits on the basis of a mental health condition.
“Cuts are certainly possible,” he said. “But history suggests that reductions in spending are often much harder to realise than is claimed.”
Spending on welfare benefits for sick and disabled people has risen by 20 billion pounds annually since Britain’s last election in 2019 – before the COVID pandemic – to 69 billion pounds a year, and a further 10.6 billion-pound rise is expected by 2029, the IFS said.
In contrast to a rise in other major rich nations, labour force participation among working-age Britons has fallen from its pre-pandemic level mainly because of a rise in long-term illness and the number of students.
Sunak has called the national election for July 4. Opinion polls suggest his Conservatives are on course to suffer a heavy defeat to the opposition centre-left Labour Party.
Labour has said it would reduce waiting lists for health treatment to get more people back to work and check the rise in the welfare bill.
Building on an announcement to support an extra 384,000 people complete talking therapies announced in the 2023 Autumn Statement, the Conservatives said their new funding will allow 576,000 access mental health support by 2029-29, helping more people stay in work.
The estimated £730m a year cost would come out of the £12bn of savings the proposals will achieve by 2030, the Conservatives said.
The Conservatives say the package of measures will intervene to stop the cost of providing benefits for working age people with health conditions ballooning from £60bn to £90bn by the end of the next parliament.
A Labour spokesman said: “This is the latest desperate announcement from Rishi Sunak, who has once again plucked numbers out of thin air in an attempt to disguise the fact that he has caused a spiralling benefits bill.
“These reheated pledges, old policies and vague promises will not get Britain healthy or benefits under control, and do nothing to solve the fact that £10bn of taxpayers’ money was lost to benefit fraud just last year.”
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