{"id":19654,"date":"2025-03-19T16:53:23","date_gmt":"2025-03-19T11:08:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/?p=19654"},"modified":"2025-03-19T16:53:23","modified_gmt":"2025-03-19T11:08:23","slug":"british-pm-says-soaring-disability-payments-devastating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/british-pm-says-soaring-disability-payments-devastating\/","title":{"rendered":"British PM says soaring disability payments ‘devastating’"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Wednesday said the country’s soaring disability costs are “devastating for the public finances”, one day after the Labour government announced cuts of \u00a35 billion ($6.5 billion).<\/p>\n

Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall on Tuesday unveiled a “significant reform package” to help disabled people into work — but some Labour MPs and charities hit out at the changes that notably included how claimants are assessed.<\/p>\n

“By 2030 we are projected to spend \u00a370 billion a year on working-age incapacity and disability benefits alone,” Starmer wrote in Wednesday’s edition of The Times newspaper.<\/p>\n

“But more importantly it has wreaked a terrible human cost. Young people shut out of the labour market at a formative age. People with complex long-term conditions, written off by a single assessment.”<\/p>\n

Kendall said that annual savings of \u00a35 billion would be achieved from the end of the decade.<\/p>\n

Starmer pointed to the 2.8 million working-age people out of work owing to long-term sickness, calling it a “damning indictment” of the previous Conservative government’s record on welfare.<\/p>\n

The PM, whose Labour party won a general election in July, added that “people who want to return to work, yet can’t access the support they need” was “happening at scale and it is indefensible”.<\/p>\n

Kendall’s welfare reform focused on narrowing eligibility for the Personal Independence Payment — a benefit aimed at helping the disabled.<\/p>\n

A total 3.66 million people were entitled to PIP in England and Wales at the end of January, official data revealed Tuesday.<\/p>\n

That was up 71 percent compared with before the Covid pandemic.<\/p>\n

Kendall said there were more than 1,000 new PIP awards every day.<\/p>\n

Tuesday’s contested announcement comes after the government recently said it would hike spending on defence, heaping fresh pressure on government coffers in the face of high borrowing costs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Wednesday said the country’s soaring disability costs are “devastating for the public finances”, one day after the Labour government announced cuts of \u00a35 billion ($6.5 billion). Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall on Tuesday unveiled a “significant reform package” to help disabled people into work — but some Labour […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19655,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19654"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19654"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19656,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19654\/revisions\/19656"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nepalsamaj.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}