Thomas H. 💙

The UK's welfare bill is smaller as a share of the economy than it was fifteen years ago, not bigger. DWP's own benefit expenditure tables put total UK welfare spending at 10.6% of GDP for 2025/26, rising only gradually to 10.9% by the end of this decade. In the years following the 2008 financial crisis, when unemployment and disability claims surged, welfare spending sat closer to 11.7% of GDP, according to figures compiled from the same DWP and OBR data. So as a proportion of national income, the welfare bill has actually fallen over the past decade and a half, even as the cash total has grown with inflation and an ageing population. Worth remembering next time a broadcaster or politician frames rising welfare spending as some runaway crisis. The DWP's own pension figures explain most of the real terms growth anyway. Pensioner benefits make up around 55% of the total, and the state pension alone is forecast at £146.1bn this year, driven by the triple lock and a growing number of pensioners, not by working age claimants. Health related and disability benefits have risen too, currently £77.1bn, but that increase reflects genuine rises in ill health and disability claims, not fraud or excess as it's often characterised. The question worth asking isn't where to cut. It's why so much political and media energy goes into framing a shrinking share of national income as an emergency.