The morning poll: Is Britain's benefits system out of control?

A report from the Resolution Foundation think-tank has found that big families on benefits will be £1,400 better off after Rachel Reeves' inflation-busting increases, while middle-class households are set to take a £480 hit due to the Iran war.

As a result, Labour has been accused of penalising hard workers with a benefits system that needs an overhaul.

 Imagine you’re the Welfare Secretary. Under your watch, unemployment reaches its highest level since a once-in-a-century pandemic. Benefit claims surge. Yet counter-intuitively, the number of people on benefits who are actually looking for work falls. And all this lands on your desk in a single week.

It’s time for a meeting without coffee with your Prime Minister – and a rocket under your plans to get people off benefits and back into work.

Unless, of course, your Prime Minister is having an even worse week, too busy fending off challengers for his own job to worry about other people’s jobs. And living in fear of backbenchers who want more spending on benefits, not less.

I speculate. But the facts are in plain sight: rising unemployment, rising benefit claims and fewer claimants job-seeking. The Government is presiding over a mass opt-out from work.

And what was the Government’s response? Not a rocket but a retreat.

This week we heard that Ministers will weaken job-search requirements for benefit claimants and give them more freedom to turn down jobs that don’t meet their aspirations.

The week before, we learned that the Government’s review of sickness benefits will take at least a year and has no ambition to save any money – despite mounting evidence that the sickness benefits system is unfit for our time.

Of course it’s good for people to get a job they like. But not if that means an extended subsidy from hard-pressed taxpayers whose own jobs are often a million miles from their childhood dreams.

There are people who genuinely need help with the costs of illness or disability, and there are conditions that make work extraordinarily difficult or impossible. Our welfare system should be a safety net for them to live with dignity.

So what should the Welfare Secretary be doing – and what should he tell the Prime Minister, if he ever gets that meeting?

He should be slamming his foot to the floor to fix the sickness-benefit system and urging Keir and Rachel to stop killing jobs and start backing businesses. Businesses are the engines of growth and opportunity, as Conservatives and the readers of this newspaper know.

To help him along, we’ve already published Conservative plans. For example: stop awarding sickness benefits for low-level mental health problems such as anxiety and mild depression. Support and work are better for people than being signed off to sit alone at home.

Return benefit assessments to face-to-face, using the empty assessment rooms I’ve seen around the country.

And reform the sick-note system, in which 93 per cent of the time people are signed off as unable to work at all for varying periods of time.

It looks like the Home Secretary may adopt our plan to stop benefits for non-Brits with Indefinite Leave to Remain. The Welfare Secretary should follow her example: swallow his pride, and copy-and-paste Conservative welfare policies too.