DANIEL HANNAN: At last there's talk of slashing welfare. Reform want to save £50bn, the Tories £23bn. So will Andy Burnham do what's needed?

Published: 01:00, 17 August 2026 | Updated: 02:41, 17 August 2026 What a benign revolution. Suddenly, all the main parties are talking of constraining the welfare budget. First the Conservatives came up with a plan for £23billion in savings, with a further root-and-branch review to follow. Now Reform says it can save £50billion. I strongly suspect Labour will be next, if not quite so radical. Why? Because politicians respond to public opinion, and there has been a gargantuan 'vibe shift' on benefits. The narrative has turned, almost overnight, from 'protecting the vulnerable' to cracking down on abuse. And you can see why. The pandemic made voters hyper-sensitive to health issues, including mental health. We were willing, in the immediate aftermath of lockdown, to give people the benefit of the doubt, to allow that there might have been a spike in anxiety, depression and other disorders. But does anyone believe, six years on, that these conditions are still surging? Does anyone think that 4million adults are too sick to work? Does anyone find it plausible that 25 per cent of the country now claims to be disabled? Plausible or not, the cost of long-term sickness benefits is going to rise to £110billion by the end of the decade, making an overhaul of the system urgent. Hence the scramble among the parties to look tough. The narrative has turned, almost overnight, from 'protecting the vulnerable' to cracking down on abuse, writes Daniel Hannan Some Reform proposals match those unveiled earlier by the Tories. Both want to shift from cash handouts to other forms of support, to disqualify low-level mental health conditions such as ADHD, to reassess existing claimants and to halt payments to foreign nationals. How long before Andy Burnham, with an eye on the electorate, also makes some moves in this direction? Until now, he has adopted the Blairish tactic of speaking in balanced (or, if you prefer, self-contradictory) sentences. He will 'get really serious' about reducing bills – but he is 'not going to go with the crude cuts to benefit levels'. He will 'make some of the support conditional upon people taking opportunities' – but he will 'not go straight to blaming' the claimants themselves. Burnham is constrained by the fact that benefits recipients cluster in Labour constituencies. Keir Starmer's very mild attempt to slow the growth in long-term sickness payments was defeated by his backbenchers – the beginning of the end of his ill-fated premiership. But, talking to Labour MPs, my sense is that they would accept from Burnham what they would not take from Starmer. We may, in other words, soon be in a place where all three leading parties are competing to prove their competence, leaving only the Greens and Lib Dems as reflexive, magic-money-tree welfarists. How refreshing to have a proper debate about the best ways to move people from the liabilities to the assets column. Does the Reform plan to shift responsibility to employers – Netherlands-style – create better incentives to get people back to work? Or is it, as the Tories claim, simply an unsustainable burden on the private sector? The important thing is that we are at last having this conversation instead of posturing about who is going to spend more taxpayers' money – at a time when our national debt has just passed £3trillion, making it the fourth-largest in the world (behind the much bigger economies of the US, China and Japan). It is, of course, easier to give a speech than to push reforms past a civil service whose first instinct is to spray money around. The only successful welfare reform we have seen in Britain came after 2010, when Iain Duncan Smith, who had spent five years honing his plans, applied a combination of tax cuts and benefits reductions which resulted in the number of long-term unemployed falling by over 600,000. The moment he was no longer there, though, the state reverted to its high-spending habits. Lockdown then introduced millions of working people who had never claimed a penny to a different way of living. When I complimented the relevant minister at the time on the efficiency of the Covid furlough scheme, she responded wryly: 'It says something about how the British state is configured that the one thing it can do efficiently is to give away money.' Quite. At around the same time, the classification of mental illnesses as equivalent to physical disabilities opened the door to almost unlimited claims, many of them obviously bogus. Will the new Prime Minister begin the reforms this side of a general election, or will he leave it to the Conservatives and Reform to come up with a more radical programme? I don't know. But thank heaven we recognise the urgency of the problem. It's later than we think. STEPHEN GLOVER: The death of Jason Arday is a terrible tragedy... it must not now be used to wage a culture war