The Conservatives have announced plans to make some huge cuts to benefits. They say they can save £36bn a year by the end of the next Parliament.
As you might already guess, I am very sceptical about this claim.
The Conservatives built much of the benefits system they are now complaining about. I was working for a DWP quango and was on the commercial board at DWP when they came back to power as part of the 2010 coalition. Years and billions were spent on welfare reform. Universal Credit was meant to simplify the system and make work pay. Personal Independence Payment was meant to cut the cost of disability benefits.
Both reforms failed utterly. And DWP still costs about £10bn a year to run. The National Audit Office puts service delivery and running costs at £10.6bn in 2025–26.
The criticisms the Conservatives are making today sound an awful lot like the ones they made in 2010. So do the solutions. They’ve even gone back to calling the plan Welfare that Works. Given that track record, it is hard to take these new promises seriously.
But there is a bigger problem. The Conservatives put the working-age welfare bill at £183bn. On their own figures, £36bn is equivalent to about £1 in every £5 of that bill.
Put it another way. There were about 42 million adults aged 18 to 64 in the UK in mid-2025, according to the ONS population estimates. Divide that £183bn bill by 42 million and you get about £4,350 a head. To save £36bn, you’d need the equivalent of taking £1,000 a year off 36 million people, or about £860 a year off every adult aged 18 to 64.
Some of the savings are supposed to come from tackling fraud and error, that is a risky plan as much of the error is in the claimants favour, not the state.
But most of the plan depends on cutting what people can claim. Who loses out, by how much, and how quickly? Cuts on that scale are hard to believe, no matter how much chatter they generate on social media.
Conservative plans for welfare are a great example of Chadwick’s first law of Government. If an ambitious right-wing politician tells you they have a plan to save money, it always ends up costing more. The more ambitious the politician, the bigger the bill.
But it also shows that the Conservatives are still living in Liz Truss world. Huge promises of tax cuts funded by savings they haven’t shown they can deliver.