Andy Burnham has called for an end to the ‘punitive’ approach to benefit cuts that he believes is designed to ‘please certain newspapers’ rather than get people back into jobs.
The Mayor of Greater Manchester gave evidence to the Work and Pensions Committee on Tuesday which is visiting his region as part of an inquiry into plans to reform job centres.
His intervention comes amid increasing discomfort among Labour figures around the Government’s decision to impose £5bn in cuts to benefits.
Mr Burnham, a former Health Secretary, believes his city-region is offering a more successful alternative to the ‘top down’ approach driven by Whitehall with what he called a ‘place-based model’ based on understanding local needs.
Asked about what the government could learn from Greater Manchester’s success, Mr Burnham said: “You can’t order people’s recovery from the top down, you can’t batter them with sanctions towards work.
“It’s unsurprising why we’re having an inquiry because it doesn’t particularly work.”
Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves (Photo: Reuters/Hannah McKay)“From my time in Westminster, and I was probably guilty of it at the time, I think benefits policy in this country has too much, under all governments, been written to create headlines to please certain newspapers and not actually to do the job of encouraging the recovery of people back to a better position in their lives.
“I think once you leave as a minister and become a mayor you just don’t think ‘will this please that paper?’
“It’s a completely different, bottom-up offer that you give to people.
“It is having the courage to step outside of a ‘you’ve got to have a punitive language linked to benefits’ [mentality] – that’s been the Westminster way for quite a long time.
“If you really want to help people, if you really want to save money and get more people into work, I think you have to come at it a completely different way.”
In her spring statement, Chancellor Rachel Reeves said reforms to the “broken” benefits system will save around £4.8 billion by the end of the decade, and £1 billion will be invested “to provide guaranteed, personalised employment support to help people back into work”.
Benefit claimants can currently be supported by work coaches at job centres in various ways, including being offered advice and referred for job opportunities.
But a National Audit Office report, published on Monday, found around 2,100 fewer work coaches were employed on average by the department than the estimated need between April and September last year.
It attributed the shortfall to a combination of factors including funding and challenges with recruiting and retaining staff.
Meanwhile, between September 2023 and November 2024 more than half (57%) of job centres reduced their support for universal credit claimants under the flexibilities DWP allows when work coaches have too many cases to deal with, including having less frequent or shorter meetings with claimants.
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