LONDON (AP) — Britain’s Labour Party government on Tuesday announced an overhaul of the welfare system that it says will save the cash-strapped administration 5 billion pounds ($6.5 billion). Critics claim it will harm some of the U.K.’s most vulnerable people.
The government says the shakeup will help people who are currently “written off” find jobs. It's a risky strategy for a party founded more than a century ago to fight for the rights of working people, and it has made trade unions and party supporters uneasy.
Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall told lawmakers in the House of Commons that the government had inherited a broken social security system that is “failing the very people it is supposed to help and holding our country back.”
She said Britain’s statistics are stark, with one in 10 working-age people claiming a sickness or disability benefit, and “millions of people who could work trapped on benefits.”
Blaming the Conservatives, who lost power in July after 14 years, for damaging the economy and health system, Kendall said “the social security system will always be there for people in genuine need.”
But she announced changes to the way disabilities are assessed. Campaigners say that will make it harder for people to get and keep benefits.
The changes, which will have to be approved by Parliament, are expected to save more than 5 billion pounds by 2030.
Not everything is being cut. The overhaul also includes an above-inflation increase to universal credit, one of the most common welfare benefits. Kendall said 1 billion pounds will be spent to "tear down barriers to work,” including new rules allowing welfare recipients to try out paid jobs without losing their benefits.
The government claims a lack of support towards employment is trapping sick and disabled people in economic inactivity. Kendall said that “in most comparable countries” spending on sickness and disability benefits “is either stable or falling – whilst ours continues to inexorably rise.”
The Disability Benefits Consortium, which represents more than 100 charities and organizations, said the “cruel” changes “will largely hit those who are unable to work and rely on these benefits to survive.”
Sarah Hughes, chief executive of mental health charity Mind, said the cuts would make it harder for people to get support and “will only serve to deepen the nation’s mental health crisis.”
Prime Minister Keir Starmer ’s center-left government has seen its popularity plummet as it grapples with a sluggish economy and creaking public services.
Treasury chief Rachel Reeves is due to make a spring budget statement on March 26, and is expected to trim public spending to make up for lower-than-expected tax takings and high borrowing costs.
Tuesday’s welfare announcement followed weeks of speculation about how deep the cuts would be.
Labour lawmaker Imran Hussain said that “thousands of the most severely disabled people in my constituency, and millions across the U.K., have watched in disbelief as politicians debate cuts to the support that enables their very survival, leaving many at breaking point.”
Kendall said she understood “the worry and anxiety.”
“And I hope I’ve made it clear to the House today, I don’t start from a position of being tough,” she said. “I start by precisely from a position of compassion.”
FILE - Incoming Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Liz Kendall arrives at Downing Street in London, Friday, July 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Thomas Krych, file)
KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) — As rescuers dug through the remains of a collapsed apartment building in Gaza’s Khan Younis on Thursday, they could hear the cries of a baby from underneath the rubble.
Suddenly, calls of “God is great” rang out. A man sprinted away from the wreckage carrying a living infant swaddled in a blanket and handed her to a waiting ambulance crew. The baby girl stirred fitfully as paramedics checked her over.
Her parents and brother were dead in the overnight Israeli airstrike.
“When we asked people, they said she is a month old and she has been under the rubble, since dawn,” said Hazen Attar, a civil defense first responder. “She had been screaming and then falling silent from time to time until we were able to get her out a short while ago, and thank God she is safe.”
The girl was identified as Ella Osama Abu Dagga. She had been born 25 days earlier, in the midst of a tenuous ceasefire that many Palestinians in Gaza had hoped would mark the end of a war that has devastated the enclave, killed tens of thousands and displaced nearly its entire population.
Only the girl's grandparents survived the attack. Killed were her brother, mother and father, along with another family that included a father and his seven children. Rescuers digging through the rubble could be seen pulling out the small body of a child sprawled on the mattress where he had been sleeping.
The girl's grandmother, Fatima Abu Dagga, sat with a group of other women in a relative's house Thursday, taking turns cradling the infant. Her sons and their wives and eight grandchildren died in the bombing, and only the baby survived. She wept over the loss, and the return to the devastation of war.
“We weren’t really living in a truce," she said. "We knew that at any moment the war might return. We never felt that there was stability, not at all.”
Israel resumed heavy strikes across Gaza on Tuesday, shattering the truce that had facilitated the release of more than two dozen hostages. Israel blamed the renewed fighting on Hamas because the militant group rejected a new proposal for the second phase of the ceasefire that departed from their signed agreement, which was mediated by the United States, Qatar and Egypt.
Nearly 600 people have been killed in Gaza since then, including more than 400 on Tuesday alone, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Health officials said most of the victims were women and children.
The strike that destroyed the infant girl’s home hit Abasan al-Kabira, a village just outside of Khan Younis near the border with Israel, killing at least 16 people, mostly women and children, according to the nearby European Hospital, which received the dead.
It was inside an area the Israeli military ordered evacuated earlier this week, encompassing most of eastern Gaza.
Nabil Abu Dagga, a relative of Ella's family who lives nearby, rushed to the scene of the strike.
“People were sitting together and enjoying themselves on a Ramadan night, staying up together as a family,” he said. “... No one was expecting it and no one would imagine that a human could kill another human in this way.”
He and others started pulling out bodies. Then they heard the baby girl's cries.
The Israel military says it only targets militants and blames civilian deaths on Hamas because it is deeply embedded in residential areas. The military did not immediately comment on the overnight strikes.
Hours later, the Israeli military restored a blockade on northern Gaza, including Gaza City, that it had maintained for most of the war, but which had been lifted under the ceasefire deal.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had returned to what remains of their homes in the north after a ceasefire took hold in January.
The war began when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage.
Israel’s blistering retaliatory air and ground offensive has killed nearly 49,000 Palestinians since then, more than half of them women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. It does not say how many were militants. Israel says it has killed around 20,000 militants, without providing evidence.
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Associated Press staff writer Abby Sewell in Beirut contributed to this report.
Ella Osama Abu Dagga, 25 days old, is held by her great-aunt Suad Abu Dagga after she was pulled from the rubble earlier following an Israeli army airstrike that killed her parents and brother in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana )
Ella Osama Abu Dagga, 25 days old, is held by her great-aunt Suad Abu Dagga after she was pulled from the rubble earlier following an Israeli army airstrike that killed her parents and brother in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana )
Ella Osama Abu Dagga, 25 days old, is held by her great-aunt Suad Abu Dagga after she was pulled from the rubble earlier following an Israeli army airstrike that killed her parents and brother in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana )
Volunteers and rescue workers use a bulldozer as to remove the rubble of a building hit by an Israeli army airstrike in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Mariam Dagga)
A volunteer attempts to pull the body of a man from the rubble following an Israeli army airstrike in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Mariam Dagga)
EDS NOTE GRAPHIC CONTENT.- Rescue workers and volunteers attempt to pull the body of a man from the rubble following an Israeli army airstrike in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Mariam Dagga)
EDS NOTE GRAPHIC CONTENT.- Rescue workers and volunteers attempt to pull the body of a man from the rubble following an Israeli army airstrike in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Mariam Dagga)
Ella Osama Abu Dagga, 25 days old, lies in a van after being pulled from the rubble following an Israeli army airstrike that killed her parents and brother in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Mariam Dagga)
