Reform to rethink welfare by scrapping £50billion from ballooning budget
A Reform UK government would redesign welfare and save over £50billion a year by scrapping benefits, Robert Jenrick has said.
Reform UK's Treasury spokesman said his party would introduce the "most comprehensive redesign" of the welfare system, scrapping personal independence payments (Pip) and the health element of Universal Credit for working-age adults.
This reworking of the welfare system would see an estimated 2.89 million Britons have their welfare claims modified or withdrawn, Mr Jenrick said.
The Reform spokesman said Britain's welfare system was "suicidal empathy".
He said his party would replace Pip with a "Health Security Allowance" - a regularly reviewed payment to support only the "gravely ill and severely challenged".
Employers would also be made to pay for a new type of insurance, a "Return to Work Cover", which would cover the cost of the first two years after an employee signed off sick.
Modelled from the Dutch system, this would make employees more "connected" to their employers, who would have a "strong economic incentive" to return Britons to work.
Writing in The Telegraph, he said the scale of the cuts would be "more than double" the Coalition's welfare savings - worth £20.5billion - and the recent Tory proposed cuts totalling £23billion.
Some £22billion of the savings would be made in changes to the disability programme alone, Mr Jenrick said.
And rather than offering cash to those with "lower-level forms of disability", Mr Jenrick said his party would create "Disability Support Accounts".
These would be managed by local authorities and mayors and used to pay for disability-related equipment, home adaptations, transport and personal assistance.
"How services are provided in Herefordshire need not match Haringey," Mr Jenrick said.
Changes to children's benefits and children's disability allowance for anxiety, depression and ADHD would be looked at by Reform UK.
Reform's full policy will be published on Monday in a 50-page paper titled Making Welfare Work.
The paper is said to be the product of six months of policy work by a team comprising Civil Service whistleblowers and some who worked with Sir Iain Duncan Smith on developing Universal Credit.
Mr Jenrick also slammed the Tories' welfare reform proposals as "paper thin", adding that the policy could have been "written on the back of a fag packet".
The welfare budget is set to rise to £333billion this year, according to the Centre for Social Justice.
But Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Helen Whately said the criticism from Reform UK was a "half-baked attempt to distract from Farage’s fishy £5million" and "his embarrassing underperformance in his pointless by-election".
She added: "Reform have been nowhere on the debate on welfare reform. They have flip-flopped on restoring the two child benefit cap and claimed they’ll only take benefits away from foreigners, which won’t do enough to bring down the overall bill.
"The Conservatives are on the side of working people and we’re clear about our plans. Restore the two-child benefit cap, end benefits for low level mental health conditions, remove benefits from foreign nationals and restore face-to-face assessments. Only the Conservatives will get Britain working again."
A Labour spokesman called Reform's claim that it could save £50billion "fantasy economics, built on stripping support from disabled people and shifting costs onto employers".
They added: "Labour is already reforming welfare: narrowing the gap between Universal Credit standard and health rates, restoring face-to-face assessments, and investing £3.5 billion in employment support to end the culture of people being signed off and written off.
"We're putting work and opportunity at the heart of the system, with further reform to follow the Milburn and Timms reports. Our reforms deliver credible, independently costed savings, not arbitrary numbers with no credible plan behind them."