Why is Rachel Reeves cutting benefits when cutting benefits doesn’t work?

The BBC has reported that she is determined to press ahead with her plan to pummel a million (according to The Times) disabled people by cutting their Personal Independence Payment on a pretext of cutting fraud, even though there is no fraud at all among claimants of that benefit.

The real reason for the planned cut is simply because she thinks the bill for these benefits is too high. But that’s not the fault of the claimants; it is a health issue.

The high disability (and sickness) benefit bill is merely a symptom of the much-privatised National Health Service’s failure to treat patients before their illnesses become too bad for them to manage.

And it is also a sign of a punitive culture that triggers and accelerates mental illnesses in millions of people.

These aren’t phantom problems – these people aren’t faking it, or “taking the mickey”, as Liz Kendall says; the figures prove it, remember – there’s no fraud among benefit claimants.

And in another report, the BBC makes it clear that cutting these benefits won’t achieve Reeves’s or Kendall’s aims.

It says one way to slow they projected rise in claims would be to hold payments flat in cash terms, rather than allowing them to rise in line with prices each year; this might save £1 billion per year in benefit payments, according to the Resolution Foundation.

But you can only receive incapacity benefit and disability benefits like PIP if your income and savings are below a certain level – people on these benefits are constantly facing poverty and deprivation, so freezing payments would harm people who are worse off.

This is likely to have a knock-on effect on other government spending – particularly in the health service, which will have to pick up the tab if large numbers of benefit claimants start suffering from malnutrition, hypothermia or worsened symptoms of the illnesses and disabilities they already have.

Also – and perhaps crucially – the Tory governments between 2014 and 2020 did not raise most working-age benefits in line with inflation because they wanted to save money. The result? From 2015 onward, increasing numbers of people claimed incapacity benefit.

Another suggestion is that eligibility criteria should be changed – the government would make it harder to claim sickness and disability benefits. This would signal a very clear intention to harm people who have real needs because it would deliberately knock them off the system for no other reason than to save money.

In any case, experience over the last 15 years shows that changing eligibility criteria does not work. PIP was introduced to replace the old Disability Living Allowance, with tightened eligibility rules, in the hope that 606,000 claimants would magically disappear (note that I do not say they would have got better or have been found to have been committing fraud, although that would have been the government’s implication), saving £1.4 billion a year.

In practice, the number of claimants increased by 100,000, although there was a saving of £100 million a year by 2015 – so you may conclude that attempts to impoverish claimants were successful.

The reason this tactic didn’t work is that people appealed against refusals of their claims – including some who created a very high-profile media fuss. Others died, kicking up an even worse row when the circumstances of their passing were publicised in the press.

The last suggestion on the BBC’s list is that claimants might be “encouraged” to go back to work. But in this situation, governments have regularly confused the carrot for the stick.

So they suggest regular reassessments of claimants – even those with progressive conditions that can only get worse. Assessors are briefed to look for every possible reason to weaken the claim in order to push people off-benefit. If they are cut off – and moved to Universal Credit – they are then required to start looking for jobs.

Put yourself in the place of someone with serious disabilities, who is in pain all day, every day as a consequence, and who is told they must get a job because some box-ticker has decided they are fit for work. You would be distraught. It may trigger mental illness if they don’t have that already. It may exacerbate their illness or disability. And it may cause them to die – as many others did, after being put in that situation by the Tories.

The BBC report says the Office for Budget Responsibility has suggested that finding people fit for work had the counterproductive effect of inducing people with illnesses and disabilities to claim other benefits.

There is also a suggestion that the government should spend money providing much more help for claimants to find jobs – but it seems these have proved not to be cost-effective; they cost more than they save.

So it seems Reeves’s cost-cutting plan is more likely to increase the government’s benefits bill than reduce it.

This seems to be habitual behaviour for her.

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