Ministers shrug off £41bn bill as Timms review kicks reform into the long grass.
Labour has once again proven it cannot be trusted with the nation’s finances, after a long-awaited review confirmed that Personal Independence Payments (PIP) are failing the very people they were designed to help — while the party in charge of the purse strings insists there is nothing to worry about.
Social Security Minister Sir Stephen Timms published his interim findings on Thursday, conceding that PIP is “not working as intended” and requires “fundamental change.” Yet in the same breath, he told the BBC that current spending levels are “not a great concern” — a remarkable statement given that the bill is on course to hit £41 billion by the end of the decade.
This is Labour all over: happy to admit a problem exists, entirely unwilling to do anything about it.
A Review Designed to Fail
The Timms review was never built to deliver savings. Its own terms of reference confirm it was commissioned to examine whether PIP is “fair and fit for the future” — not to find a single pound of efficiency. That the review took input from nearly 39,000 respondents and still emerged with no proposals to control costs tells you everything about this government’s priorities.
Remember how we got here. Sir Keir Starmer tried, briefly, to show some fiscal discipline by proposing £5 billion in PIP savings last October — only to be forced into total retreat by his own backbenchers. That climbdown was the moment the soft Left seized control of the parliamentary party, and Britain’s welfare bill has been spiralling ever since.
Now the country must wait until September — by which point Andy Burnham is expected to have taken over in Downing Street — for any actual recommendations. Leisurely doesn’t begin to cover it.
“Who Can We Tax to Pay Benefits?”
Perhaps most damning is the revelation, via the recently released Mandelson files, that Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden privately admitted every conversation he has with Labour backbenchers boils down to one question: who can be taxed to fund ever-higher benefit payments. It is the clearest possible confirmation that, for Labour, welfare reform was never about fixing a broken system — it was about finding new revenue streams to keep pouring money into it.
A System Riddled With Perverse Incentives
The review’s own evidence exposes just how dysfunctional PIP has become. One respondent told the inquiry that people who don’t need the benefit are claiming it anyway, with no incentive to seek formal work while quietly earning cash in hand undeclared. Research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies cited in the report confirms that when benefits are trimmed, people are more likely to look for a job — hardly a surprising finding, but one Labour seems determined to ignore.
Meanwhile, genuine claimants describe being trapped: too frightened to take up work in case an assessor decides they no longer qualify. This is what happens when a system is administered by a government more interested in expanding the welfare rolls than genuinely supporting the vulnerable.
The numbers speak for themselves. Working-age PIP claims have rocketed by more than 74 per cent since 2019-20, now standing at 3.3 million, with a further 680,000 pensioners also drawing the benefit. Only around a fifth of claimants are in work. Since Covid, claims for anxiety, depression and ADHD have exploded — precisely the categories the Conservatives have long argued need tighter scrutiny, not rubber-stamping.
The Tory Alternative
Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Helen Whately did not mince her words, accusing Labour of being “in denial about the welfare state” and warning that spending on PIP will double by the end of the decade under this government’s watch. She’s right. Labour has admitted the system is broken but defines “broken” as meaning benefits aren’t generous enough — the exact opposite conclusion any responsible government should draw from a bill heading towards £200 billion a year in working-age benefits alone.
The Conservatives, by contrast, have already launched their own root-and-branch review of disability and sickness benefits — one explicitly designed to find savings and rebuild a system that actually works, rather than one that simply grows. Sensible, immediate steps are obvious to anyone paying attention: reinstate face-to-face assessments, stop waving through sickness benefits for anxiety and low mood, and address the absurd disincentives that keep people who could work sitting on welfare instead.
More of the Same
With Burnham reportedly ruling out “crude cuts” and talking vaguely about tax rises, there is little reason to expect the eventual Timms recommendations to bring costs under control. An entire generation risks being written off onto long-term welfare dependency while Labour dithers, reviews, and taxes its way to nowhere.
Britain does not have a shortage of ideas for fixing PIP. It has a shortage of a government willing to make the hard choices. Labour has once again shown it is not that government.
