Reeves rejects personal authorities’s findings of cuts pushing 250,000 into poverty | EUROtoday

Rachel Reeves has denied her personal authorities’s findings that her welfare reforms will push 250,000 folks into poverty whereas refusing to rule out additional cuts.

The chancellor needs to save lots of £5 billion from the UK’s ballooning welfare invoice by making it more durable to assert Personal Independence Payments and slicing Universal Credit.

An influence evaluation, printed right this moment by the Department of Work and Pensions, mentioned 3.2 million households – together with present and future profit claimants – will lose a mean of £1,720 a 12 months on account of the adjustments.

It added: “We estimate there will be an additional 250,000 people (including 50,000 children) in relative poverty after housing costs in 2029/30 as a result of modelled changes to social security.”

But in an interview with HuffPost UK, the chancellor rejected these findings, claiming they didn’t take account of what the federal government is doing to get folks again into work.

“Those numbers are based on not a single person moving from welfare into work and we are, alongside this package of welfare reforms, putting in £1 billion of targeted, personalised and guaranteed support for anybody on sickness and disability benefits to help them find work that’s appropriate for the situation that they are in,” Ms Reeves said.

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“I know that there are thousands of people with disabilities who are desperate to work if only they were provided with the support. I understand where these numbers come from, they’re a static set of numbers as if nothing changes, but of course things will change.”

Disability campaigners have reacted angrily to the welfare cuts, which they say will have a “catastrophic” impact on benefit claimants.

Asked whether she can guarantee no one will be pushed into poverty by the welfare reforms, Reeves said: “I want more people to benefit from the security, the dignity, the extra money that comes from having a job.

“We’re also increasing the national living wage, which means that if you’re working full time you’ll be earning £1,400 more. We want people to move into secure, well-paid employment [and] we’re going to give people the support to get there.”

The chancellor was forced to find another £500 million of welfare cuts on the eve of the Spring Statement after the Office for Budget Responsibility said what had been already been announced would not deliver the savings needed.

Asked whether she can rule out more cuts to welfare in the future, Reeves said: “We’ve set out the welfare reforms that we wish to make and, alongside the adjustments, we’re additionally publishing a inexperienced paper to seek the advice of on extra focused measures to supply help for essentially the most severely disabled, but additionally taking a look at how we will incentivise younger folks to not transfer on to advantages and by no means come off them.

“We do need to make sure that our welfare system is sustainable for the future and that’s what the reforms we have set out will do.”

Asked a second time whether or not extra cuts have been attainable, she mentioned: “This is not about cuts, this is about reforming the way the welfare system works.”

The welfare system needs to be far more targeted on giving folks the help that they should discover employment moderately than parking folks on advantages, which I’m afraid was the strategy of the earlier authorities.”