Failing the fairness test on social security
The government’s rhetoric on fairness doesn’t match reality when it comes to social security cuts
The word ‘fairness’ is being used a lot at the moment when it comes to the government’s plans to cut the social security bill, ahead of tomorrow’s vote in parliament. Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall has just briefed MPs about the latest concessions offered by the government in an attempt to stave off a parliamentary defeat. The initial concessions, including exempting existing claimants of personal independence payments from cuts, have been bolstered by the announcement of an additional £300m for “Pathways to Work, health and skills support”, although by no means all of the Labour rebels have been won over.
How are politicians talking about fairness in relation to these cuts?
Last week, before the first round of concessions were outlined, the Prime Minister invoked “Labour values and fairness” in an attempt to stem growing dissent, suggesting that the harder edges of the reforms would be softened. However, just a day earlier, his deputy Angela Rayner spoke in defence of the government’s cuts, proclaiming that Labour is “the party of fairness” by pointing to other aspects of the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill, such as increases to out-of-work support. A similar assertion had been made by Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall, who insisted a week ago that the proposed cuts are “rooted in fairness, for those who need support and for taxpayers”, a line that she repeated in parliament this afternoon.
The argument about fairness for taxpayers harks back to language used by George Osborne in justifying austerity-era cuts to socials security a decade ago. Analysing parliamentary discussion of fairness in a 2023 report, Fairness in the House, we found that Conservative politicians after 2014 often sought to frame a divisive argument about fairness using the persona of the “hard-working household” or the “hard-working, taxpaying family”. The “hard-working” frame provided a rhetorical means of justifying and differentiating between “hard workers” and others, such as benefit claimants.
This was a deliberate, explicit tactic. The 2024 Conservative manifesto described how they “introduced the household benefit cap and the two-child limit to make the system fairer to the taxpayers who pay for it and ensure benefits are always a safety net, not a lifestyle choice.” People on benefits are the clear ‘out group’ here. But sometimes this approach is less obvious, and perhaps also less intentional. There were dozens of references in the 2024 Labour manifesto to “working people”. Who is left out of this implicit social contract? Is it those who are too wealthy to need to work? Or those who cannot - whether due to illness, disability, caring commitments, or a simple inability to find work?
As Tom Clark argued in Prospect last week, Labour have been making a moral as well as a financial case for the latest plans to cut social security spending, arguing that “getting people off benefits and into work is important to their dignity, and true to Labour’s political tradition”, while Labour rebels have tended to follow Keir Hardie’s argument that “the fortunes of the working and the workless [are] umbilically linked”.
There is clearly a moral case to be made around the dignity of work, and around the need for reform a system that traps some people on benefits, or at least disincentivises them from seeking work. But there’s arguably a much stronger moral case against cutting the social safety net, especially for disabled people, because it will increase inequality and poverty, which in turn will damage people’s mental and physical health, and will undermine the opportunities and life chances of claimants and their dependents. Liz Kendall talked today about being “determined to build a fairer society where everyone has the chance to fulfil their potential and achieve their ambitions”. The proposed cuts will have the opposite effect.
The key barrier to increasing economic activity is not that the social safety net is too generous, but that it is threadbare. Supporting those in need is a key part of the social contract, especially given that a key reason that they are in need is that our unequal society undermines their opportunities to contribute to it, but our social security system fails to meet people’s basic needs or to enable people to fulfil their potential and maximise their wellbeing – and these cuts will make a bad situation even worse.
The government could have led on the financial case for cutting social security spending, without trying to argue that there was a moral imperative. But here, too, the argument falls short. Short-term savings will be dwarfed by long-term costs due to rising levels of poverty and inequality. The cuts will actively undermine the government’s stated missions, undermining growth by suppressing productivity and driving economic inactivity. They will also deepen social divisions and threaten the health of our democracy. And there are clear alternatives when it comes to short-term fiscal decisions (leaving aside the question of revisiting the fiscal rules), such as reforming our tax system in ways which would raise considerably more money from those with the broadest shoulders.
The promised concessions help to reduce some of the harm done, but in doing so they introduce another source of unfairness in the form of a two-tier system - an unfair distinction between existing and new claimants, with the latter losing thousands of pounds every year simply because they developed an illness or disability after an arbitrary cut-off date. This will create what Andy Burnham has described as an “unfairness and divide in disabled people”. Liz Kendall herself said in today’s speech that “no existing claimants will be put into poverty as a result of this bill” - leaving little room for doubt about the fate of many of those who claim after the cut-off date in November 2026.
Back in March, we warned that planned social security cuts did not pass the fairness test, as measured against our five core principles, the Fair Necessities. In re-assessing the latest, watered-down cuts from the moral, political and policy perspectives, our conclusion remains that the government’s plans fail the fairness test on all five counts. You can read our two-page briefing here.
The government has an opportunity to become the party of fairness, and to build a society and economy that represents everyone’s interests, based on a strong social contract that supports both those who work hard and those who cannot work. But pushing through these cuts, even in their modified form, will cut across this agenda, and will worsen the wealth inequality that is already threatening our society, our economy and our democracy.
Over the weekend the US Institute for Policy Studies published an article from me on their website, inequality.org:
Can We Build Public and Political Support for Tackling Inequality?
Why we need to challenge the ‘meritocratic’ narrative on how people get rich.