Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, gave a speech earlier this week on the future of the welfare system. The choice that she presented was one between ‘…failing programmes and waste driving up social security spending under the Tories’, and Labour’s reforms to ‘…make work pay and get social security spending under control’. To claim that the current government has failed to control benefit spending is a bold tactic from a Labour Party economic spokesperson, and the numbers used to support the argument were so striking that they deserve some scrutiny.
Claim One: The Conservatives have spent £13bn more on social security in this parliament than they had originally intended to.
If this figure is correct, it equates to an average annual overspend over five years of around £2.6bn, which is just over 1 per cent of total welfare expenditure in 2014/15.
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