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Reform UK has vowed to cut £50bn from the welfare bill by slashing benefits for foreign nationals and people with disabilities if it wins the next general election.
Nigel Farage’s populist rightwing party said, if it was in government, it would replace the disability benefits system and ban all foreign nationals from claiming “almost all forms of welfare”.
Robert Jenrick, Reform’s Treasury spokesperson, will on Monday call for urgent cuts to the UK’s ballooning welfare bill, which was £334bn for the 2025/26 financial year — although more than half of that was the state pension.
Jenrick wrote in the Sunday Telegraph that the current system of benefits was the equivalent of “suicidal empathy” and a “strange perversion of compassion” that was not helping those most in need.
Reform UK had already proposed cutting universal credit for foreign nationals in the UK, including those with settled status. Now it is going further, saying the same ban should apply to almost all forms of welfare including housing benefit, pension credit, jobseeker’s allowance, child benefit, free childcare and disability benefit.
The party said this would save £21bn a year by the fifth year of the policy. The only exemptions would be the war widows’ pension and armed forces compensation.
It admitted that ministers would have to renegotiate the Brexit withdrawal agreement with Brussels, which requires Britain to pay benefits to EU nationals.
The European Commission did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Reform said its proposals to change disability and health benefits would save £22bn. It would abolish personal independence payments (Pip) and the health element of universal credit for working-age adults, meaning either the removal or reduction of benefits for 2.89mn people.
Those benefits would be replaced by a new system Reform calls the “health security allowance”, which would only apply to the most “severe, enduring and high-risk cases”.
Other claimants would receive help through new “disability support accounts” from councils for their “verifiable additional costs” caused by disabilities. “This will ensure that the welfare system does not encourage people to consider themselves disabled,” Reform said.
It would also make extra spending available for interventions such as physiotherapy and cognitive behavioural therapy.
Reform said that 6.9mn people received disability benefits in Britain in 2025, an increase of 2.5mn from 20 years ago driven in part by rising mental health claims. “Health and disability benefit spending is forecast to reach £110bn a year — £3,600 per family — by 2031,” it said.
But the Conservatives described the announcement as another “attempt to distract from” questions about a £5mn gift Reform leader Nigel Farage received from crypto tycoon Christopher Harborne.
Helen Whately, shadow welfare secretary, said: “This half-baked policy is just another Reform attempt to distract from Farage’s fishy £5mn and his embarrassing underperformance in his pointless by-election.”
A parliamentary standards investigation into Farage has resumed after he won a by-election last week in his constituency of Clacton, which he had triggered as an act of defiance against the “political establishment”. All other major political parties boycotted the event.
In recent weeks Labour has overtaken Reform UK in the polls for the first time in more than a year as the party enjoys a bounce under new Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
Labour described Reform’s welfare announcement as “fantasy economics, built on stripping support from disabled people and shifting costs on to employers”.
Former prime minister Sir Keir Starmer sought to cut billions from Pip payments last summer, only to be forced to back down after an uprising by large numbers of backbench Labour MPs.
Burnham has begun a new push to find ways to reduce welfare spending and get people back to work. Last month an interim report was published by Sir Stephen Timms, disability minister, recommending an overhaul of the Pip system and calling it “not fit for purpose”.
Labour said it was already reforming welfare by narrowing the gap between standard and health universal credit rates, restoring face-to-face assessments and investing £3.5bn in employment support: “Our reforms deliver credible, independently costed savings, not arbitrary numbers with no credible plan behind them.”
Farage announced in April that a Reform government would keep the “triple lock”, which means that the state pension rises every year by the highest of inflation, wage growth or 2.5 per cent. The policy has been partly blamed for the spiralling cost of the welfare state and the pressures on Britain’s public finances.
Farage said at the time that he wanted to fund that policy by slashing the welfare bill and by reviewing defined-benefit pensions for new public-sector workers.
Jenrick’s plans include making companies rather than the state pay for any employees who are off sick for the first two years after statutory sick pay expires. Reform said this would not apply to employers with five workers or fewer, and it would cut the level of employers’ national insurance contributions to offset the cost of the policy.
“Employers can make adaptations to welcome people back, while insurers have an incentive to invest in rehabilitation,” Reform said.
