Category Archives: Welfare

Starmer says Reform’s pledge to restore two-child benefit cap in full is ‘shameful’ – UK politics live

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Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick has announced party’s plans to cut welfare spending

Robert Jenrick, Reform UK’s Treasury spokesperson, is giving his speech now.

He has announced, or confirmed, three measures to cut welfare spending.

The number claiming disability benefits for an attention disorder has more than doubled since Covid. We all know a significant number of these claims are spurious …

We will stop those with mild anxiety, depression, and similar conditions from claiming disability benefits and instead encourage them into the dignity of work.

We will end the abuse of the Motability scheme, where expensive cars are handed out for conditions like tennis elbow, and paid for by working people who can’t afford them themselves.

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OBR says its inadvertent release of budget report is ‘worst failure’ in its 15-year history – UK politics live

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Office for Budget Responsibility says Rachel Reeves ‘had every right to expect that the [report] would not be publicly available until she sat down at the end of her budget speech’

Q: Yesterday you said Rachel Reeves was lying. Today you are saying she gave out false information. Are you still accusing her of being a liar?

Badenoch replies: “Yes.”

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Starmer says budget did not break manifesto tax pledge – as it happened

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PM says: ‘We kept to our manifesto in terms of what we’ve promised. But I accept the challenge that we’ve asked everybody to contribute’

The Conservative party is attacking the budget on the grounds that Rachel Reeves is putting up taxes supposedly to fund more spending on benefit claimants. Even though the rationale for this claim is questionable, the Tories were making it before the budget was announced, and Kemi Badenoch firmed it up last night, claiming it was a “Benefits Street budget”.

On LBC this morning, asked if the budget meant “alarm clock Britain paying for Benefits Street”, Reeves said she did not accept that. She said 60% of the families that would benefit from the removal of the two-child benefit cap (the most expensive welfare announcement in the budget) were in work.

I don’t think children should be punished by this pernicious policy any longer. And the cost to society of this is huge, the cost for councils of temporary accommodation, when people can no longer afford the rent, putting families in B&Bs, kids having to move to school all the time because parents have moved from B&B to another lot of temporary accommodation, and there’s costs for years to come, because all the evidence shows that kids that are growing up poor are less likely to get into work and more reliant on the welfare state in the future for them.

So this is a good investment in those kids, to give them the chances that I want for my kids, and everyone wants for their kids. It also saves money for taxpayers on that accommodation, on those additional health costs, and ensuring that those kids grow up to be productive adults.

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Nandy rules out taking action to remove Robbie Gibb from BBC board – as it happened

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Culture secretary also condemns MPs who dismiss BBC as ‘institutionally biased’ in swipe at Badenoch and Farage. This live blog is closed

Here is a round-up of what various lawyers and commentators have been saying about Donald Trump’s legal case against the BBC.

Joshua Rozenberg, the legal commentator and a former BBC journalist, has said in a post on his A Lawyer Writes Substack that the corporation should settle. He explains:

Given what Brito is claiming, the lawyer is unlikely to be impressed with the BBC’s assertion that “the purpose of editing the clip was to convey the message of the speech made by President Trump so that Panorama’s audience could better understand how it had been received by President Trump’s supporters and what was happening on the ground at that time”.

So the BBC would be well advised to draft a retraction and apology in terms that the president’s lawyer finds acceptable. Brito is also calling for this to be broadcast as prominently as the original programme. And the corporation will have to pay compensation.

George Peretz KC, chair of the Society of Labour Lawyers, says on Bluesky, commenting on Rozenberg’s blog, that the BBC might be better off with a more robust approach.

So at the moment, despite @joshuarozenberg.bsky.social’s piece, I wonder whether a better BBC response would be the Arkell v Pressdram one. proftomcrick.com/2014/04/29/a...

(At least to the extent he’s seeking more than a formal apology limited to the obvious mistake and a very modest offer of compensation.)

There is, after all, the risk of a dangerous precedent here. The BBC will often offend foreign leaders – some worse than Trump. Sometimes it will make factual mistakes in reporting on them. Yield to Trump now, and who next?

Mark Stephens, a media lawyer, told BBC Breakfast that a court case could reflect badly on Trump. He said:

Every damning quote that he’s ever uttered is going to be played back to him and picked over – not great PR.

Trump risks turning what’s currently a PR skirmish with the BBC very much on the back foot into a global headline that the court finds Trump’s words were incendiary …

George Freeman, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center in New York and a former lawyer for the New York Times, told the BBC that Trump “has a long record of unsuccessful libel suits – and an even longer record of letters like the one you received that don’t end up as lawsuits at all”.

Christopher Steele, the former MI6 officer who is trying to recover costs from Trump after the president sued him unsuccessfully in the UK, says Trump’s latest threat is preposterous.

Donald Trump’s threat to sue the BBC in London is preposterous. He remains in breach of English High Court orders in a case he brought and lost against Orbis 18 months ago. So any further abuse of the UK courts by him for such legal tourism and intimidation should be prohibited.

Robert Peston, ITV’s political editor, says the BBC has been told Trump does not have a case.

The legal advice to the BBC I am told is that President Trump was not meaningfully damaged by Panorama’s manipulation of his 6 January speech, and that therefore there is no legal necessity to pay him compensation. The BBC board is therefore likely to resist and fight his demand to be “appropriately compensated” out of court, and will risk him carrying through on his threat to seek $1bn in damages by going to court.

These times are difficult for the BBC but we will get through it. We will get through it and we will thrive. This narrative will not just be given by our enemies. It’s our narrative. We own things.

I see the free press under pressure. I see the weaponisation. I think we have to fight for our journalism.

We have made some mistakes that have cost us but we need to fight for that.

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Lucy Powell says Labour must stand by promise not to raise key taxes

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New deputy leader also calls on government to lift two-child benefit cap urgently and in full

Labour should stand by its manifesto commitment not to raise income tax, national insurance or VAT, its deputy leader, Lucy Powell, has said in a challenge that will put pressure on Rachel Reeves.

With the Treasury examining whether to raise income tax to plug a £30bn fiscal hole, Powell said it was “really important we stand by the promises we were elected on and do what we said we would do”.

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Nearly 90% of jobseekers unable to get long-term work despite millions spent on private job agencies

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Employment department’s annual report shows just 11.7% of jobseekers ended up with jobs lasting at least 26 weeks last year

Australia’s private employment services are failing to get jobseekers into long-term work, despite costing taxpayers millions of dollars each year, department documents show.

Just 11.7% of jobseekers in Australia found long-term employment through a job provider in the latest financial year, according to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations’ annual report.

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Centrelink threatening payment suspensions at rate of five a minute, new analysis suggests

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Exclusive: As jobseekers continue to have payments suspended, advocates call for the regime to be stopped until it’s proven to be lawful

Centrelink has been issuing payment suspension notices to jobseekers and those on disability support pensions at a rate of more than five a minute, new analysis suggests, amid concerns over the legality of the troubled system.

In total, government data collated by the Antipoverty Centre shows there were 2,683,605 suspension actions between June 2024 and July 2025.

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Revealed: some Australians have overpaid their Centrelink debt by more than $20,000

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Exclusive: Services Australia spokesperson says automatic BPay payments and Centrelink being unable to contact customers may be to blame

Approximately 44,000 Australians who have a debt with Centrelink have overpaid it, some by $20,000 or more, Guardian Australia can reveal.

It is the latest in a string of scandals to hit Centrelink after hundreds of thousands of people had their payments illegally cancelled, with several reviews concluding the welfare system is not working legally and the government announcing plans to undertake at least three remediation processes for separate issues – the robodebt class action, income apportionment and overpaid debts.

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Starmer only read China spy witness statements this morning, No 10 says, as Cleverly accuses PM of misquoting him – as it happened

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This blog is now closed, you can read more on this story here

Lindsay Hoyle starts by telling MPs that speakers from the parliaments in Fiji and Ukraine are in the gallery. And he says it is four years to the day since David Amess was murdered.

It’s PMQs. Here is the list of MPs down to ask a question.

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‘First job bonus’ worth £5k planned for young people, Stride tells Tory conference – UK politics live

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Shadow chancellor sets out spending plans as party conference continues in Manchester

Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, was doing an interview round for the Conservatives this morning, and Miatta Fahnbulleh, the faith and communities minister, was on the air on behalf of the government. They were both asked about the latest development in the flag phenomenon – the former footballer turned property developer Gary Neville saying that he took down a union flag flying at one of his building sites because he felt it was being used in a “negative fashion”.

Asked if Neville (a Labour supporter) had a point, Fahnbulleh told ITV’s Good Morning Britain:

I think he’s really right, that there are people who are trying to divide us at the moment …

I spent a lot of time going around our communities, talking to people. People are ground down. We’ve had a decade-and-a-half in which living standards haven’t budged and people have seen their communities held down. And you will get people trying to stoke division, trying to blame others, trying to stoke tension.

I think people that put up flags, the vast majority of people that do, do so for perfectly reasonable patriotic reasons. And I think reclaiming our flag as a flag of unity and decency and tolerance, which is the way most people see our flag, is a very positive thing.

So I’m afraid I really cannot agree with the comments that he’s made.

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Tories say people denied benefits in UK can return to home countries

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Mel Stride outlines plans to slash £47bn a year from public spending, including £23bn welfare cut

Overseas nationals denied benefits under a Conservative plan to limit social security to UK citizens would have the option to return to their own countries, the shadow chancellor, Mel Stride, has said.

Before his speech to the Conservative conference on Monday, Stride set out Tory proposals to cut £47bn a year from public spending, with the biggest chunk, £23bn coming from reductions in welfare.

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More than 300,000 Australians had Centrelink payments cancelled illegally, new analysis shows

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Peak body for community legal centres finds number of payments suspended due to IT glitch higher than department initially identified

Hundreds of thousands of Centrelink payments were illegally cancelled because of a glitch in the automated system that runs the government’s controversial mutual obligations scheme, the peak body for community legal centres has said.

The analysis from Economic Justice Australia shows about 310,000 people had their Centrelink payments unlawfully cancelled between 2020 and 2024 because they were not given enough time to reconnect to a job provider after missing a compulsory activity as part of their mutual obligations.

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Lucy Powell: Labour should raise gambling taxes to axe two-child benefit cap

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Deputy leadership candidate says party needs to be ‘clear that our objective is to lift children out of poverty’

Labour should consider raising taxes on gambling firms to cover the cost of lifting the two-child benefit cap, the party’s deputy leadership candidate Lucy Powell has suggested.

The Manchester Central MP, who is battling with the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, to succeed Angela Rayner as Labour’s deputy leader, also acknowledged the public was “exasperated” because of “some mistakes” Labour had made in office.

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Scrap two-child benefit cap to help lift 4m people out of poverty, government urged

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Exclusive: Cross-party Poverty Strategy Commission says abolishing limit would be part of its ‘once in a generation’ plan

A cross-party commission including former welfare ministers is urging the government to scrap the two-child benefit limit as part of an ambitious “once in a generation” plan to lift millions of people out of poverty.

The Poverty Strategy Commission said billions of pounds of investment – including a boost to the rate of universal credit – was needed to reverse record levels of poverty in the UK, and tackle longstanding failures over rising hardship and destitution.

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UK politics: Pressure grows on Starmer as Channel migrant figures pass 50,000 since Labour’s win – as it happened

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Home Office data shows 474 migrants arrived yesterday in eight small boats bringing the total to over 50,000

Rachel Reeves has been taking questions from journalists in Belfast. She says Northern Ireland is “absolutely crucial” for the UK’s growth prospects, pointing to the nation’s strong TV, film and video game industries.

The chancellor claimed stability has returned to the UK’s economy despite mounting concerns about its ability to respond to shocks amid global uncertainty from Donald Trump’s trade war. Job losses are rising, fewer employers are advertising for staff and inflation remains high.

If you look at the growth numbers in the first quarter of this year, we were the fastest growing economy in the whole of the G7. Whilst the US economy shrunk in the first quarter of this year, the UK economy grew.

We’ll get data for the second quarter of this year later this week. But we are creating more jobs, 384,000 additional jobs compared with a year ago, wages are rising at a faster rate than inflation, putting more money in people’s pockets.

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Tens of thousands at risk of poverty despite Labour’s benefit U-turn, MPs warn

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Changes to welfare reforms not enough to protect newly sick and disabled people from financial hardship

About 50,000 people who become disabled or chronically ill will be pushed into poverty by the end of the decade because of cuts to incapacity benefit, despite ministers dropping the bulk of its welfare reform plans, MPs have warned.

The work and pensions select committee report welcomed ministers’ decision earlier this month to drop some of the most controversial aspects of its disability reforms in the face of a parliamentary revolt by over 100 Labour backbenchers.

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Training organisation criticised for using chatbots to run job seeker course

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Duke Education says their course uses ‘chat-style delivery’ to deliver classes on writing emails and identifying hazards but does not utilise artificial intelligence

A training organisation co-run by a vice-president of the Collingwood football club has been criticised for using chatbots to help teach a course to adult job seekers.

Duke Education, a registered training organisation (RTO), offers a certificate III in community services. A chatbot takes students through some of the coursework, such as how to write an email and recognise hazard signs.

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Women who conceived in abusive relationships lose legal challenge over benefits ‘rape clause’

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Justice Collins Rice says it is for politicians and not courts to change rules around two-child benefit cap

Two women who conceived their eldest children while they were in violent and controlling relationships have lost a legal challenge to the rules around the two-child benefit cap.

A high court judge said the accounts of the abuse the women faced when they were “vulnerable girls barely out of childhood” were “chilling”.

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Keir Starmer and Friedrich Merz sign UK-Germany friendship and cooperation treaty – UK politics live

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UK PM and German chancellor sign first bilateral agreement between the UK and Germany since the second world war

While Rushanara Ali is answering the urgent question in the Commons, Keir Starmer is speaking at the event where he is announcing a “civil society covenant”.

There is a live feed here.

Why does this government think a 16-year-old can vote but not be allowed to buy a lottery ticket or an alcoholic drink, marry or go to war, or even stand in the elections they’re voting? It isn’t the government’s position on the age of maturity just hopelessly confused?

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Ministers urged to overhaul and raise carer’s allowance

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Resolution Foundation says unpaid carers on low incomes pay ‘very heavy price’ for looking after loved ones

The carer’s allowance benefit should be overhauled and the basic rate of payment increased to lift more unpaid carers and disabled people out of financial hardship, according to a living standards thinktank.

The Resolution Foundation said unpaid carers on low incomes were paying a “very heavy price” – a typical penalty of 10% or as much as £7,000 a year compared with non-carers – for looking after loved ones full-time.

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