Badenoch's £8bn welfare cuts: who is hit and who is exempt
Kemi Badenoch has set out Conservative plans to cut £8billion from the welfare budget in order to raise defence spending by £10billion and hit 3 per cent of GDP by 2030. The Tory leader told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the money has to come from somewhere, warning that "without national security, there aren't going to be any benefits".
Roughly half of that £8billion would come from changes to the housing benefit bill, which works out at about £4billion. The rest would come from capping elements of welfare spending, including reinstating the two-child benefit cap.
The group most directly affected would be people claiming local housing allowance in areas where rents are high. Mrs Badenoch said those tenants would be expected to move to cheaper places, telling the programme: "What we are saying is that where people are living in areas where it's too expensive. They'll have to move somewhere cheaper. Moving somewhere cheaper is what everybody else does."
She insisted there are limits to the plan. Pensioners would not be covered, and neither would existing tenants. "We're not removing people from homes, this doesn't cover pensioners, existing tenants, but I do think you need to be fair," she said.
On the two-child cap, her argument was about who pays. "I think other people who are choosing not to have more children because they can't afford it should not be paying for other people to have children," she said, adding that the welfare bill is "getting out of control" and that Britain now spends more on welfare than on defence and education combined.
The Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, rejected the approach. He described the proposed benefit cuts as "crude" and said he would not fund the Armed Forces that way. "We do everything to support our national security, but it cannot come at the expense of social security," he said. He warned that taking £4billion out of housing benefit would create "levels of homelessness in this country that we wouldn't have seen before", with hundreds of thousands of children in temporary accommodation.
The figures behind the row are large. According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, the total welfare bill is expected to rise from £333billion to £407billion by 2030/31. Spending on sickness and disability benefits alone is on course to reach £109billion by the end of the decade, an increase of more than £30billion on last year.
What happens next is unresolved. Mr Burnham has so far refused to commit to the 3 per cent defence target, which his new Chancellor John Healey has called the minimum needed to keep the country safe. Mrs Badenoch said that leaves only two options. "This means he's either not going to fund defence or he's doing to fund it by raising taxes. There's no other way," she said.
For households, that is the part worth watching. Nobody in this argument is offering a cheaper outcome. One side is proposing lower housing support and a cap on family payments, the other has not ruled out tax rises to pay for the same defence commitment. Either way the bill lands on the same kitchen tables, and anyone renting privately on local housing allowance should keep a close eye on what is announced next.
