When Reform’s Robert Jenrick announced on Monday that the party would slash a whopping £50bn from Britain’s ballooning welfare bill by targeting foreign recipients, its online army of supporters were cockahoop (even if Rats in a Sack explained how Jenrick’s back-of-a-fag packet calculations would do no such thing).
Now the truth is emerging: that fully £22bn of its savings will actually come from reforming personal independent payments, or Pips. This is not going down quite so well, as the effect is likely to be felt most of all in Reform-held seats or the party’s target constituencies.
When Jenrick and deputy leader Richard Tice invited journalists to a London press conference to announce their plan, the focus was very much on the foreigner-bashing, even though the 700,000 non-EU foreign nationals with Indefinite Leave to Remain currently make up just 2.6% of claims. (Despite Reform’s claims, newly-arrived immigrants can’t claim benefits, as UK visas are issued with a “no recourse to public funds” clause.)
What wasn’t trumpeted so loudly – and indeed the full document wasn’t published until journalists had left the room and could therefore no longer quiz Bobby J or Dubai Dicky – was the small print suggesting that about half of current Pip claimants would receive next to nothing under Reform’s plans.
Perhaps it wasn’t trumpeted so loudly because of the disproportionate way it would target those who currently vote Reform. In Tice’s seat of Boston and Skegness, where his majority is just 2,010, 21.6% are on out-of-work benefits, with 10,548 claiming Pip.
In Clacton, just re-won by Nigel Farage in a by-election, 10,442 people claim Pip. Given that the Great Leader’s majority is 12,784, no wonder he waited until his victory was secure before it emerged that an awful lot of those people would be losing their benefits under a Reform government!
And even in Robert Jenrick’s constituency of Newark, where he won with a 3,571 majority (as a Conservative) in 2024, 6,011 people are in receipt of Pip payments, enough for him to lose his seat if they all turned against him over his own cuts.
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One councillor has already quit in opposition to the policy. John Bell, a member of Mabe Parish Council in Cornwall, just earlier this month posted a picture to X of himself and Farage with the caption “I’m 100% behind Nigel”. This week he quit, posting: “I cannot in good conscience support the Making Welfare Work policy. These changes will cost lives of people especially those who have suicidal ideation.”
How long will Jenrick’s flagship welfare policy last when his ground troops realise they’re going to have to tell their own voters their benefits will be slashed?
MEANWHILE: While at least once councillor has resigned over a policy disagreement, one has quit for a more traditionally Reformy reason. It has just emerged Christine Duffy resigned from Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council earlier this month with a one-line letter to the relevant authority explaining: “I have had very little or no training for this role.”
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