JPIT’s Paul Morrison responds to the Spring Statement 2025
Poverty and inequality in the UK are on track to increase. Rather than addressing these concerning trends, which cause so much harm to people’s lives, the measures announced in this Spring Statement will exacerbate them. The international outlook is more volatile than a few months ago, and the Statement confirmed the removal of money from the long-term work of international development, that can build peace and real security and instead reallocate it to warfighting capabilities. The Statement did include some welcome investments, especially in housing, but overall, it was not good news for those concerned about poverty or peace.
Directly increasing poverty
The government estimates that its changes to disability benefits will directly increase the number of people experiencing poverty by 250,000, including 50,000 children. Other analysis suggests that interactions with other benefits will further increase that number, and just as importantly, the changes will push many people already experiencing poverty further down.
Almost 1 in 5 people receiving Universal Credit and disability benefits used a foodbank last month, with more than double that number regularly skipping meals to make ends meet. It is incontrovertible that people with a disability are much more likely to face poverty, hunger and deep hardship than the rest of society.
The health element of Universal Credit is being halved for new claimants and cut more slowly for existing claimants. This benefit is for those living on a low income where someone has a condition that limits the amount of work they can do. Importantly many are in work but earning a low income. This will affect around 3 million families.
Personal Independence Payments, the benefit that supports people with the additional costs of living with a disability, is being made more difficult to attain. Around 800,000 people, mainly on low incomes, will lose between £4,200 and £6,300 a year.
The experience of church-based advice centres is that too many people who need PIP are not getting it, and that the scoring and assessment system is already harsh and sometimes arbitrary. These changes move things in the wrong direction.
Disability and employment support
The government is providing additional support to help people into work, which is welcome, however neither the Office of Budgetary Responsibility nor the government has produced any indication of what impact this will have on employment or poverty. “Get more people into work” makes for a popular and easy soundbite to soften the announcement of benefit cuts, but there is a huge body of evidence – including a recent analysis by Action for Children – to show that improving employment outcomes is slow, expensive and difficult.
Defence and international development
Church leaders have already responded with lament to the cutting of the international development budget to pay for increased defence spending. The Spring Statement made much of increased defence spending and arms exports being a source of economic growth. The aspiration to increase defence spending further to 3% of GDP featured highly, while the prior commitment to return the aid budget to 0.7% of GDP was absent. Again, we regret that our nation’s responsibilities to the world’s poorest communities appear to have been forgotten.
Invest to bring about change
The Spring Statement included additional investment in a number of areas of work: to reduce fraud in the tax system, to reduce benefit overpayments including fraud[i][SM1] , and to increase departmental efficiency. The Chancellor’s spending rules mean that spending on these investments is counted differently against borrowing from day-to-day government spending.
It is to be welcomed that the Chancellor recognises that to achieve positive results, investment is often needed. Over the weekend, 35 senior faith leaders – including leaders from the denominations in JPIT – called for the government to invest in the UK’s children and be bold and ambitious when designing its imminent Child Poverty Strategy. Our children need to be invested in if they are to reach their potential, as do people with disabilities, as does the long-term work of building human security around the globe. Although trumpeted as being about delivering security, this Spring Statement did not deliver the investment that is needed to bring about positive change in these vital areas.
[i] I would note that every pound spent on reducing tax fraud gets more than twice the return of a pound spent on tackling benefit fraud. p14 -21 of treasury policy costings
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