If disability benefits spending is flat, then welfare spending is probably going down

There’s always feverish speculation about an upcoming budget; if your inbox is anything like mine, you’ve been deluged with emails/messages telling you what might be in the budget tomorrow (Wed 26th Nov). But I’m not a political soothsayer, so I’m not going to do that here.

Instead, I wanted to quickly share the big picture up to this point. This is still going to be useful tomorrow, because it usually takes a few weeks for the detailed charts on benefits to become available;1 so you can keep this to hand when looking at the proposed Budget changes over lunch…

Having repeatedly pointed out that welfare spending isn’t out of control in July/24, Sep/24, and Mar/25, I am suddenly in good company. Chris Giles at the FT used my figures for a piece titled, “No need for a moral panic about the welfare system”, while Tom Carter at the Economist independently recreated these figures,2 and similarly concluded that “These claims [of out-of-control welfare] are overblown.”

Ahead of tomorrow’s Budget, I therefore wanted to update my previous blog posts to the latest figures currently available (from the Spring Budget) - and also to correct a couple of small things, and to separate out the role of children’s disability benefits (that were previously included in ‘Other’):

A couple of things to note here. Firstly, these are the forecasts without taking into account the Parliamentary rebellion that led to the proposed PIP cuts being abandoned3 - so PIP spending is probably going to be higher than these forecasts suggest.

And secondly, returning to the headline of this blog post - the chart shows that overall non-pensioner welfare spending is forecast to be flat. Within this, health/disability-related spending is forecast to rise, and other spending is forecast to fall. So assuming nothing else changes, any attempt to keep health/disability-related spending flat means a cut in welfare overall. (At least as a share of GDP, which to my mind is the only sensible way of looking at it).

To be clear: I do think that there’s a case for rebalancing spending in the benefits system, so that benefits are less contingent on disability assessments - see more in After the WCA, as well as next week’s blog and beyond. But rebalancing spending is different from simply taking money out of the benefits system as a whole under the guise of ‘controlling disability benefits spending’.

Having spent ages wrestling with these charts, I thought it was useful to share them so that others can tweak them as necessary (nice to give me credit if so, but the important thing is to get the figures right!). Just to be completely transparent about how I created the chart/spreadsheet:

• I’ve used the latest Government Benefits Expenditure and Caseload tables for Great Britain (excluding devolved benefits);

• I’ve added in the spending from Scotland;

• I’ve made one small correction from an error I’ve spotted;4

• I’ve corrected a few things that are counted inconsistently over time (see the labelling in the footnote under the chart above);

• I’ve added up various things that aren’t very clearly presented in the main release, so that you can see what’s actually been going on.

In case you want to do this yourself / amend what I’ve done, I’ve now tidied up my tables sufficiently that you can download them here.5

My expectation is that there’s not going to be much on health & disability-related benefits tomorrow (because some WCA-related changes have already happened, and any PIP changes need to wait until after the Timms review) - but it seems likely that there will be some announcements on the benefits system more broadly, including around the two-child limit, and maybe young people’s disability benefits.

Whatever is announced, the challenge is always keeping the bigger picture in mind, rather than focusing on the narrow changes - and hopefully this chart/spreadsheet helps with that. And do remember that the OBR’s assumptions about how people will change their behaviour are likely to make a big difference to the numbers.

Finally, I promised to focus on issues rather than data in my forthcoming blogging - sorry for getting distracted by the Budget, but I will (at long last!) return to issues of medicalisation next week…