A Labour MP on the Work and Pensions committee just threw disabled people under the bus

Labour MP David Pinto-Duschinsky has jumped on his LabourList soapbox to defend Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) boss Liz Kendall’s callous cuts to chronically ill and disabled people’s benefits – specifically Personal Independence Payment (PIP) and Universal Credit.

It comes the day after the DWP committee – that he’s a member of – lambasted the cuts in a letter to the prime minister.

DWP PIP and universal credit cuts: committee calls government to halt

The Work and Pensions Committee has been conducting an inquiry into the government’s Pathways to Work Green Paper plans for DWP PIP and Universal Credit.

In particular, the inquiry is intending to look at the impacts of these DWP policy changes on disabled people. Moreover, it aims to unpack the poverty and employment effects of the reforms.

Now, the committee has advised the government to pause its plans for parliament to vote on some of these reforms in early June. As ITV News reported:

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is being advised to urgently pause the Government’s plans to cut disability and health benefits by Parliament’s work and pensions committee, ITV News can reveal.

The cross-party group, chaired by Labour MP Debbie Abrahams, has expedited the conclusions of a report into the reforms – and has said they should not go ahead without a comprehensive impact assessment.

The politicians say that disabled people must also be consulted before MPs are asked to vote on the reforms.

After hearing from a series of experts, the group warns of possible unintended consequences.

However, the ink had barely dried when one member of the committee decided to contradict the whole thing.

A ‘fulfilment’ of Labour values

The DWP committee sent the letter to Starmer on Wednesday 21 May. By 6am the morning 22 May, committee member David Pinto-Duschinsky had a column on LabourList titled:

‘Welfare reform is not a betrayal of Labour values – it’s their fulfilment’

He opened with some dewy-eyed Clement Attlee welfare state nostalgia:

The creation of the modern welfare state by the 1945 Labour government remains one of the party’s proudest legacies. A system to support society’s most vulnerable is an enduring symbol of fairness, collective responsibility, and the belief that no one should be left behind.

In the aftermath of war, Labour didn’t just built institutions like the NHS and the welfare system. We enshrined at the very heart of the state the idea all should not just be protected from the material hardships but should be given true access of opportunity and the support they needed to make the most of their lives.

These were not mere policies. They were moral commitments, asserting that dignity, security, and agency should be the birthright of every citizen.

You can almost feel the ‘but’ coming in your bones. He continued that:

But today, the welfare system faces urgent challenges. Economic inactivity is rising, with one in ten working age people now out of the labour market, millions locked out of work, and support systems too often unresponsive and inflexible.

Then, he went onto argue that:

It is no accident that employment rates among disabled people are almost thirty percent below those of non-disabled people. It is no accident that unemployed disabled people are only a third as likely to flow into work in any given year as other workers. It is no accident only 0.9% of people on the UC health component (the LCWRA) find work each month. And it’s unfortunately no accident that almost forty percent of people on these benefits are stuck in poverty.

Now, there is one thing we can agree on. Successive UK government’s have continued to strip chronically ill and disabled people of support.

Only recently, the Canary reported on leaked DWP plans to limit the already woefully inadequate and failing Access to Work Scheme.

Jobs marked as ‘disability confident’, part-time, and work-from-home on the government’s OWN employment portal have hovered in the single digits for months. Don’t look now, but it has broken into the double digit numbers – a whole 10 jobs – across the entire UK. Repeated real-terms cuts to benefits and regressive reforms have decimated welfare. Benefit rates – even when factoring in LCWRA and DWP PIP – will be well below minimum wage. That’s state-sanctioned poverty. It is no accident.

DWP PIP cuts will ‘push people into deeper poverty’

None of this is what Pinto-Duschinsky was getting at. Instead, it’s the beyond parody idea that the generosity of health-related UC and DWP PIP are ‘incentivising’ people into claiming them. In Pinto-Duschinsky’s neoliberal fanaticist world-view, it’s ‘trapping’ people on benefits.

Compare and contrast with the committee letter:

other factors might also be driving people to claim both incapacity and disability benefits, including, in particular: rising ill-health, including mental ill-health; rising financial insecurity, particularly among disabled people; and the exclusion of disabled people from the workplace, exacerbated by the rise in the state pension age.

It seems very possible that these other factors, which we will address in our final report, have indeed contributed to rising caseloads. If this is the case, the legislative changes might not incentivise work, as the Government hopes, but rather push people deeper into poverty, worsen health, especially in more deprived areas, and move people further from the labour market, as evidence suggests has happened in the past with similar reforms.

In short, Labour’s plans will push chronically ill and disabled people into poverty. Of course, Pinto-Duschinsky and the government already know that. Its own impact assessment showed this. Worse than this, as the Canary underscored at the time, it’s undoubtedly an enormous underestimate too – as multiple FOIs and research has also backed up since.

Get Britain Working group at it again

Canary readers might also remember that Pinto-Duschinsky headed up the notorious ‘Get Britain Work’ group. This was the 36-strong line-up of Labour MPs who popped up to back chancellor Rachel Reeves and Kendall’s war on chronically ill and disabled people’s welfare. It just so happened to be populated with a menagerie of neoliberals from the Labour right who took donations from Morgan McSweeney brainchild Labour Together.

Yes, THAT Pinto-Duschinsky. With him spearheading the charge, the group penned a letter declaring their sycophantic support. And funnily enough, at the time, he also wrote an accompanying column for City A.M. that peddled much of the same guff.

As the Canary’s Steve Topple summed up, this spouted well-worn DWP PIP and benefit propaganda:

It was more-of-the-same nonsense: work is good for disabled people; we’ve got a worklessness crisis; people are left to rot on benefits, but the main problem is it’s costing us too much.

For Pinto-Duschinsky, ‘difficult choices’ is deciding to hurt other people. To chronically ill and disabled people if the government plough ahead with these cuts, ‘difficult choices’ will be whether to eat, heat their homes in winter, forgo vital aids that give them that “dignity and empowerment” Pinto-Duschinsky so vociferously banged on about.

In his ode to Kendall’s Iain Duncan-Smith tribute act, he wrapped up with:

We must take on the challenge of reform, not in spite of our Labour values, but because of them.

According to Pinto-Duschinsky:

This is not a betrayal of Labour values. It is their fulfilment.

At the end of the day, this is what Labour is now.

Pinto-Duschinsky’s column was a blatant attempt to distance himself from the committee’s warnings. The letter is notably absent from his X account. Meanwhile, the column was worth a strategically-timed post – go figure.

Featured image via the Canary