Reform wants to slash £50 billion from welfare spending. Here's what it could mean for benefits

Reform UK has set out plans it says will save more than £50bn a year from the welfare bill by 2030 – through measures including scrapping personal independence payments (PIP) and barring non-UK citizens from claiming benefits.

Published in full , the plans would also force thousands of long-term unemployed people to carry out 20 hours a week of unpaid work.

Campaigners have described the proposals as “cruel and dangerous”, warning they could push hundreds of thousands of children into poverty and make life “impossible” for disabled people.

Reform’s Robert Jenrick insists the party is simply narrowing the welfare state to “preserve its future”.

“A system intended as a safety net has become a way of life, including for foreigners who haven’t paid a penny,” Jenrick wrote in a foreword to the plans.

Reform’s proposal, as the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) put it, amounts to a “substantially different vision of what the benefit system should be doing”.

But what would that vision actually look like – and do the numbers really add up?

The government will spend more than £350 billion on welfare benefits this year. Some £143bn of that goes on the state pension, which Farage’s party has promised to protect. So how does Reform plan to cut nearly a quarter of the remaining £207bn?

Read more:

• I have arthritis, incontinence and other chronic health conditions. The DWP didn’t think I needed PIP
• The Timms Review must stop people with terminal illness being forced to reapply for PIP 
• Four ways the government could change PIP for the better

Slashing disability benefits

The biggest chunk of Reform’s proposed savings would come from health and disability benefits. The party says its reforms could save around £20bn in the long term.

For those with the most severe disabilities, Reform would combine PIP and part of universal credit’s health support into a flat-rate “health security allowance” of £429.80 a month. Some separate support for additional disability-related costs would also be available.

For the Disability Benefits Consortium – a coalition of more than 100 charities, including Scope, Mencap, Parkinson’s UK and the MS Society – the consequences are clear.

“Scrapping PIP and the UC health element are cruel and dangerous proposals which would vastly increase poverty and worsen people’s health,” said Charles Gillies, the consortium’s policy co-chair and senior policy officer at the MS Society.

The party would also introduce a new system of “return to work cover”. If an employee remained off sick after their statutory sick pay ended, their employer – or an insurer – would be responsible for providing support for the next two years.

Anyone needing longer-term support would then face a new “disability needs assessment”, replacing the current assessments for PIP and universal credit.

“The objective is to reduce the number of people on disability benefits by around 40%,” the document reads. “The threshold for cash support will be significantly higher than today.”

Existing claimants would not necessarily be spared. Reform says those with mental health conditions and what it calls “trivial conditions” would be reassessed into the new system over three years.

The party says people with the most severe disabilities would be protected. But its plans would create a system that is “much harder to qualify for”, according to Tom Waters, associate director at the IFS.

“There is relatively little detail on what the new assessment would actually entail,” Waters said, adding that previous attempts to tighten the disability benefits system had seen savings fall “significantly short of government’s expectations”.

Last year, then-prime minister Keir Starmer was forced to row back on planned cuts to disability benefits after a severe backlash.

This new vision is even worse, said Gillies.

“These damaging proposals would deprive the vast majority of disabled people – including those with MS – of any form of health-related financial support from the social security system,” he warned.

“This would also cause huge amounts of pressure for the NHS and other public services.”

A disability rights campaigner known as Ben Claimant issued a similar warning.

“What they are doing is not reducing cost, they are increasing it and moving it to different parts of the spreadsheet. Making it more hidden for headlines. It will create a greater burden on the NHS, local councils, social services, social care, the emergency services and education,” he told Big Issue.

“What is needed is investment, not cuts. Investment in services, staff, support, education and training. We need our public services back to prevent the problems we are seeing now.”

Making benefit claimants work

Reform would also overhaul the rules for people who are out of work.

Those judged capable of working but unemployed for more than a year could be required to carry out 20 hours a week of unpaid community work to keep receiving their benefits.

The document suggests they could be sent to clean streets, maintain parks or staff libraries.

Those who refuse without what Reform considers a good reason could face sanctions.

Cutting support for foreign nationals

Another £20 billion of Reform’s claimed savings would come from restricting access to working-age benefits for foreign nationals.

The proposal would make non-UK citizens largely ineligible for benefits. There are currently around 1.3 million non-UK citizens claiming universal credit, according to the IFS, including 650,000 who are not in employment.

But calculating savings is far from straightforward.

“How much this saves would depend on how many of this group became citizens in response,” Waters said.

The savings could be substantial, he said, if a Reform government also made it difficult for anyone who had previously claimed benefits to become a British citizen.

But removing support would mean “large overnight cuts to claimants’ incomes” and “significant increases in hardship”, the IFS warned. Some people in the group currently receive most or all of their income from benefits.

Amnesty International UK said the proposal amounted to “scapegoating”.

“The same goes for people permitted to make this country their home,” said Jen Clark, the charity’s economic, social and cultural rights director. “The minority who claim social security do so on the same basis as other taxpayers. Stripping their benefits isn’t fairness, it’s scapegoating.”

The policy could also prove difficult to negotiate with the EU. If Britain scraps benefits for EU citizens living here on long-term visas, Brits who claim benefits across EU countries could face sanctions in return.

Changing the inflation measure

One of Reform’s proposals sounds technical: changing the measure of inflation used to increase benefits each year. But the IFS says it could have major consequences.

The party wants to use a lower measure of inflation, which it estimates could save £4.8bn a year by 2033-34.

Waters called it “another technical-sounding proposal that is in fact of real significance”.

Compared with the current rules, he said, the change would “continue to shrink the size of the benefit system indefinitely”.

In other words, this would not be a one-off cut. If benefits rose more slowly year after year, the gap between what claimants received and what they would have received under the current system would continue to widen. As would the gap between benefits and the cost of living.

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