Sir Keir Starmer has warned Britain’s benefits system is broken and fixing it is a “moral imperative”, days after a revolt by his own backbenchers forced him into a U-turn on welfare cuts.
The Labour leader announced the climbdown late this week, in the face of potential defeat by Labour MPs over his plans.
On Saturday he pledged Labour would not “take away the safety net” on which vulnerable people rely.
But he added that he could not let welfare “become a snare for those who can and want to work” as he said that “everyone agrees” on the need for change.
Earlier he faced calls for a “reset” of his government, in the wake of the welfare debacle, by the Labour peer and party grandee Lord Falconer.
The veteran Labour MP Diane Abbott also hit out at some of Sir Keir’s advisers, calling them “angry and factional” in an interview with the BBC’s Today programme.
Despite the climbdown the prime minister is also continuing to battle with some of his own MPs over the planned cuts, with reports some rebel MPs will attempt to put down a new amendment on Monday to delay the bill.
On Friday Ms Abbott said that reports of the rebellion’s death “are greatly exaggerated”.
Downing Street now expects its plans to pass their second reading in the House of Commons on Tuesday, however.
In a speech to the Welsh Labour conference, Sir Keir said repairing the system had to be done in a “Labour way”.
“We cannot take away the safety net that vulnerable people rely on, and we won’t, but we also can’t let it become a snare for those who can and want to work,” he said. “Everyone agrees that our welfare system is broken: failing people every day, a generation of young people written off for good and the cost spiralling out of control.
“Fixing it is a moral imperative, but we need to do it in a Labour way.”
Sir Keir had been facing a humiliating defeat, with more than 120 Labour MPs having signed a rebel amendment seeking to kill the welfare bill.
But leading economists have warned that, taken together, the U-turns on benefit cuts and winter fuel payments have blown a £4.5bn hole in the public finances that will “very likely” be filled by tax rises in the autumn Budget.
The Resolution Foundation said the prime minister’s decision to protect existing claimants of disability benefits and health benefits would be far more expensive than expected.
The Resolution Foundation said the change to Sir Keir’s welfare bill, which will protect all those currently claiming Personal Independence Payments (PIP), will stop 370,000 people from losing the support.
That will cost £2.1bn per year by 2030, while a separate move to protect the income of all those receiving the health element of Universal Credit, which will affect 2.2 million people, will cost up to a further £1.1bn each year.
It will wipe out up to £3.2bn of the £5bn the government had hoped to save through the changes.
The National Institute of Economic and Social Research said taxes will “almost certainly” go up in the autumn.
There is speculation the chancellor could raise the money through so-called ‘fiscal drag’ by freezing income tax thresholds, with Ruth Curtice, the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, saying the “most obvious thing” would be to extend the freeze for another two years.
Ministers have refused to speculate on how the government will pay for the changes.
Tory leader Kemi Badenoch said Sir Keir had left the country with “the worst of all worlds” after the U-turn.
