Meeting of the Parliament 23 April 2025
Since the election last year, the Labour UK Government has failed to compensate the WASPI women—women against state pension inequality—and has scrapped winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners, and it is now plotting to cut disability benefits. Labour should listen to poverty groups, disabled people’s organisations and many others and scrap those outrageous cuts. If it ploughs ahead, the Westminster Government will harm the most vulnerable, push more disabled people into poverty and mark the start of a new era of austerity cuts under the Labour Party.
Despite offering change in the election just last year, Keir Starmer’s Government has kept some of the worst aspects of Tory welfare reforms—in particular, the two-child cap and rape clause. It has also kept strict Tory fiscal rules, which has meant cuts that go further than even the Tories dared—to winter fuel payments and, now, to disability benefits.
The Resolution Foundation highlighted that the Labour chancellor was
“wrong to concentrate the pain so heavily on a relatively small number of disability benefit claimants.”
Its analysis also shows that the poorest 50 per cent of households are set to become £500 a year poorer over the next five years thanks to Labour’s spring statement.
Let us look at what is happening under the SNP Scottish Government. According to experts at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Scotland is set to be the only part of the UK to see a decline in child poverty rates in the coming years, and there is a growing gap between child poverty rates in Scotland and those in Labour-run England and Wales. The JRF has said that that is in large part due to Scotland-specific policies, such as the game-changing Scottish child payment.
This year’s Scottish budget gives funding to develop the systems that are necessary to in effect scrap the two-child cap next year. That SNP Government decision will lift a further 15,000 children out of poverty. In contrast, Labour’s decision to keep the two-child cap puts over 100 more children into poverty every single day.