Ben Chu

speaker

290 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 17 Aug

Ben Chu’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.

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Newscast · Andy Burnham (Almost) Wins · 9 Jul 2026 podcast

And one thing that policy analysts say is that as the rest of the system has become cut and become less generous, the incentive for people to move on to the sickness and disability benefits like PIP,

goes up.

So you squeeze the welfare system by cuts in one part, and those costs come up in the other, also with unintended consequences that people feel that they can't enter the workforce because they'll lose those sickness and disability benefits.

So I think what Stephen Timms is recognizing and acknowledging is that we need to look at the overall picture and the overall incentives and look at costs in that overall context.

So a lot of this rhetoric about the welfare system bill is out of control and unaffordable is a bit misleading, because that's only looking at one part of the bill.

Total non-pensioner welfare spending is not out of control and is not up on where it was 15 years ago.

And interestingly, the Office for Budget Responsibility, the official forecaster, reiterated this week that it doesn't expect that overall bill to shoot up over the next few years either.

Look, I'm not saying there's not a problem.

A lot of most experts agree that you do need to reform PIP.

You do need to reform other elements of it.

But just to keep a bit of a cool head in this hot weather about the overall state of the bill for when it comes to working age welfare.

Yeah, just picking up on Alex's point about the challenge for Andy Burnham, because he did give an interview to The Times where he did suggest that he is trying to save money or he does want to save money from the welfare bill over time.

And he suggested maybe some of that money could go to funding more spending on defence.

But as Alex said, he said he wouldn't impose crude cuts on

And he hopes to do it not by reducing entitlements or the generosity of the system, but getting more people into work.

But there is a bit of a timing issue with that, because if you do want to make savings, say, by the end of this parliament, the kind of way of he's proposing to do it is unlikely to do that.

It may well do it over the longer term, but certainly not enough to make savings, probably to get you to work.

3% of GDP being spent on defence.

So there's a little bit of a mismatch, I'd suggest, in some of his rhetoric there and the reality of, A, as Alex said, how difficult it will actually be to implement these kind of reforms in a way that actually work, and also in terms of getting any kind of savings from the system relative to the course that it's on.

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