Ministers Weigh Scrapping a Disability Benefit for Under-25s
Ministers are working on welfare plans that include removing the health element of universal credit for claimants under 25, replacing it with a multibillion-pound package of support into work. The payment has already been almost halved, to £217 a month. The plans await the conclusions of Alan Milburn’s review of young people’s employment and the Timms panel on personal independence payments.
Twenty-four hours after the Conservative leader proposed barring most jobless under-25s from universal credit, the government is found to be working on something adjacent, which is the more significant fact: the argument is no longer whether to attach conditions to young people’s benefits but how far. A government source framed it as reform rather than retrenchment — a “comprehensive package of support and reform to tackle the scandal of a million young people not in education, employment or training” — and Mr Milburn has called it “shameful” that the state spends twenty-five times as much on benefits for this group as on helping them into work. The scale explains the attention: welfare spending has reached £333bn this year, with pensioners taking roughly 55% of it. The resistance is already organised. More than forty leading charities wrote to ministers earlier this year warning that cuts or tougher sanctions on disabled young people risked pushing them deeper into poverty and further from employment. Watch whether the Budget pre-empts Milburn.