The welfare ratchet has to be challenged

The latest political debate over disability benefit is following a depressingly familiar trajectory. Last week, Penny Mordaunt, the government minister responsible for the policy, tabled amendments in the Commons to the system of Personal Independence Payments (PIPs) to ensure they go only to the most needy. Her move followed a tribunal ruling that claimants with psychological problems who cannot travel without help must be treated like those who are blind. Then, George Freeman, the head of Theresa May’s policy board, said benefits should go to “really disabled people” rather than those who are “taking pills at home, who suffer from anxiety”.

Even though no existing claimant will lose out, outrage has ensued. Mr Freeman has been forced to apologise and Tory MPs are now demanding a rethink which could add £4 billion to the PIP benefit bill over the next five years. In 2010, spending on all benefits connected to disability and incapacity to work was around £42 billion. This year it is about £49 billion. Efforts to control costs are invariably resisted. Helping people whose physical or mental impairment makes normal life difficult is an accepted component of a modern welfare state in a civilised country. But it cannot be an open-ended commitment.

The idea behind PIPs was to get the most help to the most vulnerable people – with the non-physical conditions treated on the same basis as physical ones. One third of all recipients are suffering from mental illnesses. The court decision broadened the way PIP criteria should be interpreted, in the Government’s view going beyond the original intention of the policy. One of the judgments held that someone who cannot make a journey without assistance due to psychological distress should be scored in the same way as a person who needs help to navigate. The amendments are designed to maintain the original purposes of PIPs.

This is another example of the welfare ratchet, where a benefit intended for one purpose morphs into another. As successive governments have discovered, once payments are conceded there is no taking them back – so spending on welfare rises inexorably. Yet to question this is to risk being denounced as heartless, which is why governments find it easier to back down than to defend their position. It would be no surprise were the same to happen again. But at some point the colossal cost of this approach has to be confronted.