The Conservatives will be the only party calling for radical cuts to welfare spending, Kemi Badenoch has said, as she warned that Britain’s standard of living is “not an entitlement”.
The Tory leader called on Sir Keir Starmer to work with her to find billions of pounds in savings or risk bankrupting the economy and being forced to appeal for an international bailout.
Badenoch asked the prime minister to “sit down with us” and work on a solution to “out of control” spending on benefits.
The government is projected to spend £100 billion a year on sickness benefits alone by 2030. Labour almost entirely dropped a £5 billion package of welfare cuts earlier this year after a rebellion from the back benches. The Conservatives voted against the measures, saying they did not go far enough.
• Sick days at highest level in 15 years
A Labour spokesman dismissed the offer to work across the aisle, calling it “delusional” for Badenoch to think “anyone would want to take economic advice” from the Conservatives.
Badenoch’s allies are hoping to cast the party as distinct from Reform UK and Labour by focusing on being fiscally responsible.
Shortly before the election, Conservative ministers had proposed radical cost-saving reforms, which would have led to those with depression and anxiety losing payments. The proposals were never implemented and Labour later ditched plans that would have saved less money.
Nigel Farage, the Reform leader, promised last week to “outline some serious cuts” to the welfare budget. But Badenoch argued that Reform, which has pledged to remove the two-child benefit cap, is “just as bad as all the other left-wing parties” on welfare.
Badenoch criticised Labour’s failure to cut benefits
TOLGA AKMEN/EPA
“There is a hard truth that we must face up to in this country”, Badenoch said in a speech to accountants in central London. “Britain’s standard of living is not an entitlement, it is the sum of our collective efforts. There is no guarantee that we will enjoy a particular quality of life just because we are the United Kingdom.
“If we want it, we have to earn it. If we want to stay wealthy, we have to produce wealth, we cannot print it.”
Badenoch said the “national credit card is close to maxed out” and told the BBC on Monday she was “really worried” that the UK might be forced to ask the International Monetary Fund for a bailout.
She added that succeeding generations could be “saddled with paying for Rachel Reeves’s wasteful borrowing” on top of health, social care and pensions.
Badenoch refused to fully commit her party to maintaining the triple lock on pensions in future.
The annual cost of the lock, where pensions increase by the rate of inflation, earnings or 2.5 per cent, whichever is highest, will reach £15.5 billion a year by 2030, three times higher than originally predicted when the policy was introduced by the Conservative-led coalition government in 2011.
Asked if Badenoch would support changing the policy in future, she said: “The triple lock is conservative policy. It has been and it continues to be so.
“We need to start where the immediate problem is … Right now, what people see is unfairness. They see a whole bunch of people not working and then having to pay more and more, having a higher cost of living, paying for other people not to go to work.
“From the principle of fairness, the important place to start is welfare. That is why we’ve started with welfare. That’s where we have identified savings and we want to find common ground.”