Conservative welfare plan to cut DWP benefits claims for 2.5 million people with low-level conditions, Digi Mart USA News (United Kingdom): The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) could be forced to launch a crackdown on benefits claimants with anxiety under the Conservatives, according to a report from Birmingham Live.
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch will urge people with anxiety to show a can-do spirit as she sets out a £36bn benefits plan. Ms Badenoch wants to reduce the £180 billion a year going to working-age adults.
Her Welfare that Works package would remove claims from 2.5 million people for what are described as “low-level” problems. In a speech, she is expected to say: “Double amputees run marathons.
People who are housebound do wonderful, creative work from home. People with autism run some of the biggest tech companies in the world.”
Ms Badenoch will also say: “If you tell a young person that their ADHD means they are defective and will never amount to anything, that mindset is likely to be more destructive to their future than the condition itself.” She will add: “The weight of this welfare burden is crushing our economy and plunging us deeper and deeper into debt.
There is no world in which the current system is sustainable and not just because of the cost.”
Last week, Prime Minister Andy Burnham insisted that he will “stick to my guns” on his approach to benefits. He declined to put a number on how much he wanted to see the cost of welfare fall.
“If [the Tories] were to do that, there’d be another big number over here for the utter chaos that they cause in people’s lives,” he said. “If you just go to brutal cuts, you will leave people in absolute crisis and then they will be going into other services in a chaotic way.”
“If you come at it from a numbers game, you’ll just make those cuts and you’ll throw people into crisis, so the £36bn won’t be a number that will hold because you’ll be spending money on people in A&E and the police, [the] criminal justice system.”
A Labour Party spokesman said: “The Tories let the welfare bill soar on their watch. Now they have the audacity to pretend it was nothing to do with them.”
