‘It’s immoral to keep young people on benefits’ - Lewis Goodall
Labour says it has no plans to cut welfare spending, but has been criticised for the huge cost of the number of people claiming benefits in 2026. Is this an economic issue, or a moral one?
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What’s the story?
The cost of welfare for people of working age in the UK is currently £145 billion a year.
Total welfare spending is currently around £334 billion a year – and is predicted to rise to £407 billion by the end of the decade.
Keir Stamer’s Labour government is currently being hammered by opponents to address this spiralling cost – with calls to switch some of that money to the UK’s defence budget instead.
Lewis Goodall says young people are losing some of the most important years of their lives due to the UK’s welfare system.
“Allowing people in their 20s, particularly for mental health conditions, not to go into work and lay foundations for the rest of their lives is immoral,” Lewis says.
“There's nothing socialist or social democratic or left wing or progressive about allowing people to be on benefits and lose the most fruitful, productive, industrious, years of their lives to a half-life.
“That is what being on benefits can be.”
It is estimated that half of new disability benefit claims in the UK are now linked to anxiety, depression or other psychological conditions.
Mental health problems have risen sharply since the Covid-19 pandemic, especially among younger people, in ways that have not been experienced in other countries.
“Our mental health services are very poor, and some countries will have better provision than we do,” Lewis adds.
NHS waiting lists have decreased slightly under Keir Starmer's Labour government, but lengthy waits mean some people are still waiting so long they end up on welfare, when a more efficient service could have prevented this.
‘Labour need to be more aggressive making the case for benefits’
Lewis says discussion of welfare reform always results in claims of trying to "demonise" those who receive benefits, and Lewis says that needs to change.
“Many Labour MPs come from backgrounds in charities and have an instinctive antipathy to any measure that might be shown to have any negative distributional impact on the poorest people in society – which welfare reform, to some extent, always will do,” he says.
“Labour ministers need to be far more aggressive in making the moral – not just economic – case about benefits.”
Jon Sopel says the government should be spending more on the defence budget, as it did in the 1950s when there was a more equal balance with welfare. The 2025/26 forecast is for defence spending of around £60 billion.
“We should be cutting down on welfare spending if people are claiming things that they shouldn't be allowed to claim,” he says.
“Questions need to be raised about why so many more people are claiming incapacity benefits or sickness benefits.”
‘People say staying on benefits long term isn’t good for them’
Lewis adds he has personal experience of the UK’s welfare system.
“I’ve had people in my family on long term sickness benefits,” he says.
“I don't think that's a good place for them to be, and I think they themselves might say that it wasn't over the long term a good place for them to be.”
Lewis says he has seen how hard it is for people who have been on welfare long term to get back into the workforce.
“When people say that they'd like to go back into work, but they feel that they can't, they genuinely have profound anxiety because they can't imagine working again,” he says.
“To some extent, that is as a result of the system.”