Is spending on benefits really out of control? What exactly do we spend on welfare, and who receives it?

How much do we spend overall? 
The government spent £329.1 billion on benefits in the financial year 2025/26 – equivalent to 10.7% of GDP, and about £4,700 per person in Britain. It amounts to roughly a quarter of all government spending, and dwarfs the totals spent on the NHS (about £257 billion), education (about £126 billion) and defence (about £62 billion). The welfare bill increased by about £18.8 billion in the last financial year; by 2030/31, it is expected to rise to £408.6 billion. This projected increase is fuelling calls from across the political spectrum to rein in welfare spending, particularly on disability and incapacity benefits; many also argue that increases in pension spending are unsustainable. 

Who receives this money? 
More than 24 million people claimed some form of Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) benefit in August last year. Of these, 13.4 million were pensioners: of the entire welfare budget, about 55% goes to pensioners. The state pension cost an estimated £146 billion in 2025/26; and another £31 billion or so went on pension credit, housing benefit for pensioners, the winter fuel allowance, and so on. In total, the UK spent £145 billion on benefits for working-age people and children – including incapacity and disability benefits (£77 billion); housing benefit (£37 billion); and child benefit (£13 billion).

Last August, about 10 million recipients were of working age; and 860,000 were children receiving disability living allowance. Around a third of working-age benefit claimants are in employment of some kind (for example, low-paid workers get in-work top-up via universal credit). The latest figures show 1.6 million people who are fit for work are claiming an unemployment benefit; the cost, spread across different benefits, is some £1.4 billion.  

Why is the bill rising? 
In no small part because of pensions. Since the “triple lock” was introduced by the coalition government in 2011, pensions have been guaranteed to increase by whichever is highest: inflation, average wage growth or 2.5%. This has led to sharp rises in the state pension in recent years, when inflation and wage growth have run high (pensions rose by 10.1% in 2023, 8.5% in 2024, 4.1% in 2025, and 4.8% in 2026).

By 2030, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) reckons the triple lock will add £15.5 billion a year to the welfare bill. But pensions are by no means the only factor. Benefits are also rising because more people are claiming disability and incapacity benefits. In 2010, Britain spent about £45 billion on such benefits; by 2025, this had risen to £77 billion.  

Which benefits are these? 
By the middle of this year, more than 4.5 million people in England and Wales were claiming at least one of an overlapping patchwork of incapacity and disability benefits, up from fewer than three million in 2020. The fastest growing is the Personal Independence Payment (Pip): cash payments to cover the extra costs of being disabled – a payment that has gradually replaced the older disability living allowance and incapacity benefit. By July, 4.1 million people were claiming a Pip in England and Wales, up 7% from last year’s 3.83 million; in 2019 there were two million. More than two million now receive health-related benefits under a separate universal credit regime. 

So are people getting sicker? 
Some experts point to worsening public health since the 2008 financial crisis, citing factors such as growing obesity, long hospital waiting times, the cost-of-living crisis and other social causes. But critics of the system argue that the rise in disability and incapacity claimants owes more to broadening definitions of disability – and especially to an increase in people claiming benefits for mental health conditions. In 2002, 25% of disability benefit recipients claimed primarily for a mental health condition (or a learning or neurodevelopmental condition); by 2025, this had risen to 45%. About one in seven working-age Britons now report having a long-term mental or behavioural disorder (up 50% in a decade). 

How can this be explained? 
Again, by most measures there has in fact been a recent increase in mental ill-health in Britain, particularly since the pandemic. Most European countries have seen similar trends; but most have not seen this translate into higher health benefit claims. Another possible explanation is the collapse in face-to-face assessments for Pip claims (down from 80% pre-pandemic to less than 15% in July 2026), which may make it harder to weed out bogus claimants – some of whom are coached by AI bots or so-called “sickfluencers” on social media. A further explanation may lie in the design of the welfare system itself, which encourages people to seek generous long-term sickness benefits. 

Is the welfare bill sustainable? 
It is often said to be “spiralling”, but the overall bill has remained pretty stable as a proportion of the UK’s national income. Welfare spending amounted to just under 11% of GDP in the last financial year – up from 10.4% in 1996/97, but lower than the peak of 12.4% in 2009/10. In fact, total non-pensioner benefits have hovered between 4% and 5% for more than 40 years. International comparisons are difficult, but the UK’s welfare bill is by most measures right in the middle of the OECD developed nations – it spends far less as a share of GDP than, say, France or Italy, and far more than the US or South Korea.

Despite recent increases, the state pension is relatively ungenerous, though Britons do have good private pensions. Spending on disability and incapacity benefits is growing fast: it is set to hit 2.1% of GDP in 2028 (almost double the share two decades earlier). The Timms Review into the Pip system is due soon, but an interim report has already deemed it “unfit for purpose”. Pat McFadden, the work and pensions secretary, said this week that Labour would make benefits reform a “moral crusade”.

Perverse incentives 
If you’re unemployed, you don’t get much from the state. Unemployment benefit under universal credit is £339 per month if you’re under 25, £425 if you’re over 25. Add in housing benefit, and it reaches around £12,000 per year. However, if you have a long-term disability or a health condition, you get extra payments (at least £217 a month more). If you are categorised in the higher form of sickness benefits, the overall figure rises to over £17,000, according to Centre for Social Justice figures. Add in Pip, and it reaches an average of £24,000, just below the full-time minimum wage. Add in child benefit for one child, and you are paid over £27,000 – closer to the national average wage. Obviously, the system gives powerful incentives for people to claim sickness, physical or mental; and, unlike with unemployment benefit, it brings with it little or no pressure to seek a job. There are currently around 1,000 new Pip claims submitted every day in the UK; about 34% are successful. 

However, reform is difficult: it is perceived as an attack on society’s most vulnerable. When Keir Starmer tried to tighten the assessment criteria for Pip, with a bill in June 2025 designed to save £5 billion per year, a threatened rebellion by 126 Labour MPs forced him to back down.

Back in 2020, Barack Obama warned that Western democracies were facing a crisis because citizens increasingly occupied different realities, and struggled to agree even on basic facts. “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false,” he said, “then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work.” 

That vulnerability has only grown since then, said The Guardian, not least because “democracy’s enemies have become more determined to exploit it”. This is the threat that Andy Burnham highlighted in his speech to the UN last week. The PM accused Russia of waging an “industrial-scale assault” on the UK’s “information environment”, using armies of bots and fake websites to spread falsehoods, inflame tensions and interfere in elections. He announced the creation of a “National Centre for Information Defence” to thwart campaigns by hostile actors. It was a welcome, and overdue, step – although Burnham failed to mention one important part of the story. “The Kremlin would be wasting its money” if US platforms such as X “didn’t provide channels for the toxin to spread”. 

The Kremlin, according to Burnham, spends around £1.3 billion a year manipulating information. “He pointed to bots, fake websites, fabricated newspaper articles and the forging of the branding of 28 British organisations, including universities and the BBC,” said Hamish de Bretton-Gordon in The Telegraph. “Social media and AI have taken an old Soviet weapon and strapped a rocket to it.” 

This is “an age of information warfare”, said Dominic Adler on UnHerd. When the Iranian regime disconnected internet access in January, “a network of pro-Scottish independence social media accounts” suddenly went silent. There is evidence that Russia “weaponised” the Henry Nowak case, feeding the anxieties of the British far-right. But foreign powers have always used propaganda against their enemies; only the medium is new. And this new unit worries free-speech advocates: can the government be trusted to “separate opinion from genuine disinformation”? 

Given that GCHQ is already responsible for detecting and disrupting information attacks from hostile states, what is the new National Centre for Information Defence actually for, asked David Shipley in The Spectator. The government published its initial plan in the spring, saying that it was designed to take on “extremists” who “foment division and target UK institutions”, including “digital grifters” and “politicians of grievance”. All this sounds very much like the state trying to extend control over speech it sees as threatening. The fear is that a “Ministry of Truth” is being set up in Whitehall.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Wayne and Coleen Rooney, says Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian, is that the couple are still together. They first met at the age of 12, when they were growing up in Croxteth, a working-class suburb of Liverpool. They started dating at 16; and at 22, they got married. Rooney was by then already a huge football star – and so their relationship was tabloid fodder more or less from the start. 

Wayne, especially, didn’t always handle this well. He was wounded when, aged 16, it was falsely reported that he couldn’t read or write; and it was painful when his personal failings (not least paying for sex in backstreet massage parlours) were splashed on the front pages. Owing to all that, plus his “aggressive” playing style, he thinks most people made up their own minds – basically, he says, that he is an “arsehole” – years ago. 

But these days, he and Coleen present as a fairly typical married couple. They live expensive lives, but still visit family back in Croxteth. She runs the house and marshals their four boys, aged eight to 16. Wayne is “funny and laid-back”, she says, but can be impatient. Do they argue much? “I can’t remember the last time,” says Wayne. “We’ve been on a good run lately, haven’t we? We’ve not had a row for weeks and weeks.” In any case, he’s learnt to keep his counsel if things get heated. “[I] let her get it off her chest. I don’t think I’ve ever won an argument with her.”