Fact check: ‘Welfare bill’ cost and tracking Labour’s pledges

Round-up of fact checks from the last week compiled by Full Fact.

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This round-up of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s largest fact checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information.

How much is the ‘welfare bill’ set to increase by?

Ahead of the Government’s announcement this week of sweeping changes to the benefits system, we saw various claims about the amount spent on “welfare” or “social security”.

Speaking prior to Tuesday’s statement about the reforms, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and another minister both suggested that such spending is set to reach £70 billion by the end of the decade.

Sir Keir said at an event last week: “The welfare system as it’s set up, it can’t be defended on economic terms or moral terms. Economically, the cost is going through the roof. So if we don’t do anything, the cost of welfare is going to go to £70 billion per year.”

And in a broadcast interview on Monday, Economic Secretary to the Treasury Emma Reynolds MP said that without changes “we’ll be spending £70 billion on social security by the end of the decade”.

However, these figures appear to refer specifically to the forecast cost of working-age health and disability benefit spending by 2029/30 – not the overall cost of welfare spending, which is much higher.

Figures published by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) prior to this week’s announcement forecast that spending on health and disability benefits for working-age adults would increase from £56.4 billion in 2024/25 to £75.7 billion in 2029/30.

Spending on welfare excluding pensions and other pensioner spending was forecast to increase from £162.9 billion in 2024/25 to £195 billion in 2029/30, while spending on overall welfare (including pensions and other pensioner spending) was forecast to increase from £313.6 billion to £377.7 billion over the same period.

In Tuesday’s statement, the Government said it expected its changes to the welfare system, which include ending the work capability assessment and changing the eligibility criteria for personal independence payments, to save “over £5 billion” in 2029/2030. It said it will publish “OBR-certified costings of individual measures” alongside next week’s spring statement.

Government Tracker shows we need greater transparency on Labour’s pledges

It’s been four months since we at Full Fact launched our Government Tracker â€“ a major ongoing project tracking the Government’s progress in delivering some key pledges, made both in the Labour manifesto and in the eight months since Labour took office.

We’re now monitoring progress on 51 pledges. And while the Government’s made clear progress on a range of commitments, we believe it still needs to do much more to explain what some of its pledges mean and how progress on them should be measured.

While many of the Government’s promises are clear, or have been clarified since Labour formed a Government, we’ve found it difficult or impossible to meaningfully rate 12 pledges, due either to unclear wording or insufficient information about the details of the pledge.

That represents nearly a quarter of the pledges we’re tracking so far, selected from an initial list of almost 300 trackable commitments in Labour’s election manifesto and some of the commitments the Government has made subsequently.

We’ve been unable to give any meaningful verdict on three pledges – including the commitment to “not increase taxes on working people” and to deliver “thousands more GPs” – because of a lack of clarity and essential information about what Labour originally pledged.

We think a further nine pledges – such as the promises to recruit “6,500 new expert teachers in key subjects” or halve serious violent crime – lack important information to determine how success should be measured.

We’ve so far rated eight of the 51 pledges we’ve examined as ‘achieved’, and a further 16 as ‘appears on track’. Three pledges are currently rated as ‘appears off track’ however, including the commitment to “secure the highest sustained growth in the G7” and the promise to end the use of “asylum hotels”.

The Government recently declared it had achieved one manifesto pledge – to deliver an extra two million NHS appointments – even though that pledge appears to have originally been set in the manifesto as an annual target, which means we won’t be able to say for sure if it has been achieved until the first year of the parliament is complete. For now, we’ve rated that pledge as ‘appears on track’.

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