Tories can cut the welfare bill by "£12billion", Helen Whately tells GB News

GB News

The Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary has assured that the Conservatives would slash £12billion from the welfare bill if the party wins the next general election.Speaking to GB News, Helen Whately was grilled on the "ballooning bill" the Tories left to the Labour Government, following Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer's U-turn on welfare reforms.FULL STORY HERE.

Transcript

00:01Ali McGovern, who is a Labour minister, has said that work is not a route out of poverty.

00:07I'll quote her.

00:08It is simply no longer the case that work, by definition, provides a route out of poverty.

00:14It is also true that getting any job is not a route to better pay.

00:19What's your analysis of that statement by Labour?

00:24Well, I think the problem is that that reflects the Labour mindset,

00:27which is much more towards giving people handouts and keeping people on benefits,

00:32compared to the approach we take, which is that work is the best way out of poverty,

00:37work is the best way to improve your situation,

00:40and the right thing for people to do is to be supporting themselves and their families,

00:45and that's what the government should be trying to achieve.

00:48There's one reason we believe that they don't,

00:50and why they're having so much trouble getting welfare savings through their MPs,

00:54even with such a huge majority.

00:55But the welfare bill did balloon under the Conservatives, didn't it?

01:00You had Ian Duncan-Smith, your predecessor, introduce universal credit,

01:04the benefit bills came down.

01:07How on earth did you allow it, as the Conservative government,

01:10to get this high, this quickly?

01:13We're talking about £86 billion in a decade.

01:15That is unprecedented.

01:18The benefits bill back in 1985, I looked it up, was £12 billion.

01:22That's equivalent to the savings you're saying that we now need.

01:25That's the entire benefits bill in 1985.

01:28So, as you just said, in the period between 2010 and the pandemic,

01:35we brought the welfare bill down.

01:37We did a particularly good job at getting people back into work,

01:40introducing universal credit, which was a big reform and hard to do.

01:43It was controversial in Parliament,

01:45but we did it because it was the right thing to do to make sure that work paid.

01:49What we then saw, more recently, as I said, coming through the pandemic,

01:52was this rise in people claiming sickness benefits,

01:54and the sickness benefits system not working for the world that we live in.

01:58One of the things that has happened,

02:00and I campaigned on mental health when I was first a Member of Parliament.

02:04I wanted to see better treatment in the NHS

02:06for people with serious mental illnesses.

02:08We did work that reduced the stigma of mental health,

02:11but what we have seen is this huge rise in people coming forwards

02:14with claims to do with mental health,

02:16and, as I said, the shift from face-to-face to more telephone assessments.

02:20These are both things that need to change to fix the system.

02:22We had reforms in progress in the run-up to the last election,

02:26which the Labour government has abandoned.

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