Badenoch pledges £36bn welfare cuts, ending DLA for ‘milder’ ADHD
Kemi Badenoch launched a “Welfare That Works” plan she says would save £36bn a year, including £2.8bn from ending Disability Living Allowance for children with “milder cases” of ADHD, behavioural disorders or learning difficulties, with only the most severe 30% of cases keeping payments. “If you tell a young person that their ADHD means they are defective … that mindset is likely to be more destructive to their future than the condition itself,” she said. Labour called it “a charter for homelessness and human misery”.
Child DLA claims have risen from 521,476 in 2020 to 914,000, with payments of £30.30 to £194.60 a week; under the plan new claims and reassessments for the remaining 70% would lose the cash in favour of £1bn of mental-health and family-hub support, with physical disabilities exempt. Helen Whately said the system had become a “conveyor belt” to “a lifetime on benefits”. The rest of the package cuts £13.7bn from sickness and disability benefits, £9.5bn from payments to foreign nationals, £4.5bn from local housing allowance and £3.1bn by restoring the two-child cap. Ms Badenoch, promising no “nasty surprises”, said benefits were “crushing our economy” and that “double amputees run marathons”. The Child Poverty Action Group said the plan would “take the UK back to the dark ages, causing the biggest overnight increase in child poverty since records began”, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies doubts the £36bn is realistic. The timing is pointed: Alan Milburn’s review of youth inactivity and Sir Stephen Timms’s review of disability benefits both land this month, and the government has yet to say how it will fund its own homelessness and Neet pledges. Watch whether Reform matches the Conservatives’ numbers.