Thursday 1 May may be a bruising first test for the government. Ahead of these local elections, Labour sits alongside Reform in the polls. And now, with the news of impending welfare reforms, the race could tighten further. There is the small problem of the Runcorn and Helsby by-election too, to be held on the same day.
Halton Lea ward is a smattering of estates next to a large shopping centre. Pebble-dash bungalows and former council homes now in the care of private housing associations account for most of the area. It has one of the highest concentrations of residents in receipt of Personal Independence Payments (PIP) – one in every five. The highest concentration in the UK is just over that, at 21 per cent in the Gwynfi and Croeserw villages in Neath Port Talbot.
The new welfare reforms will tighten the eligibility criteria from November 2026. We don’t know the details, and we won’t know until the Spring Statement on 26 March. (There is a lesson here in how not to do government communications, but more on that below.)
The reforms will go further than PIP. Incapacity benefit will be frozen and then slashed – the existing £97 per week will be reduced to £50 per week from 2026/27 for new claimants. There will be exemptions for those with the most severe health conditions. And this applies both to those in receipt of incapacity benefits and PIP. But the general trend will be fewer people receiving less. As the Resolution Foundation put it, this will be an “income shock for millions of low-income households”.
The uncertainty over who and what will be effected forces us to work with conjecture rather than certainty. In that spirit, where could this be hardest felt?
The map points us towards the Welsh valleys, urban Lancashire, the Yorkshire coalfields, Barnsley, Bootle, Birkenhead, Bolsover. And almost all of County Durham and Tyneside are covered by the darkest of shades of red. It trends Labour’s safer seats. But in the seats down south, where Labour struck gold last summer, is where the pain will be least felt.
Drill down to electoral wards and familiar names in other tales of Britain’s deprivation pop up: Jaywick, and Clacton, the seat of absentee MP Nigel Farage. Like Runcorn, it has one of the higher concentrations of PIP claimants in the country. Rhyl, seat of Labour’s Gill German, who rose to query Liz Kendall’s statement to the house on the welfare reforms, has an above average concentration of PIP claimants too.
On a more granular level, we can see in Runcorn and Helsby that Labour’s appeal in the seat touches both PIP-heavy and PIP-lite wards. Whereas Reform’s popularity is currently located in PIP-heavy only.
In PIP-heavy areas Labour are in contention with Reform for first place. And Reform may have the advantage here, because arguments that Reform would be worse on cuts than Labour – an argument some on the centre-left are trying to make – won’t work for the very simple reason that it is Labour, not Reform, making the cuts.
But there is something else to consider. Public opinion more broadly is the master here. And most Britons agree the welfare state is not strict enough (including a plurality of Labour’s new electorate). That sentiment has intensified since Covid, when the unassuming middle classes had to learn what Universal Credit was.
On this, the government has the mood music just about right. And the aggression from ministers will have an audience.
But this is not the decade of “scroungers” vs “strivers” – a Tory narrative put about in the run-up to the 2010 election. Voters are more sympathetic to welfare claimants, trade unions, and a general leftist approach to policy than they were in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Most Britons now believe welfare is not generous enough to the disabled and old. When prompted with specifics, most Britons do an about-turn, and disagree that the welfare state is too generous. In other words, if you personalise it, Britons aren’t quite so sharp-elbowed.
Here is the conundrum. Britons want a have cake/eat cake approach to welfare provision. It should be strict. It should be tough. My taxes shouldn’t fund the undeserving. But Mrs Muggins needs it. And that lovely lady down the road too. And aren’t the pavements terrible these days? Of course we should support the disabled more.
This is far cry from the tougher view Britons had 15 or so years ago. But it is not a clear one, and it won’t be easy to navigate electorally.
[See more: A Labour welfare revolt is still brewing]
Content from our partners
