Reform UK has set out plans it says will save more than £50bn a year from the welfare bill by 2030 if it gets into government. The party believes it can deliver much of this by stopping foreign nationals from getting most benefits and also reforming disability payments while protecting the most "severely disabled". BBC Verify has been breaking down what Reform says it wants to do - and how realistic it is.
The UK government will spend £353bn on welfare benefits this year - just under half of that goes on the state pension, which Reform has said it will not cut. That leaves £207bn - so cutting £50bn a year like Reform proposes would represent roughly 25% of total remaining welfare spending, which would be extremely ambitious. One of the benefits Reform is looking at is Personal Independence Payments (PIP) - a working age payment that helps individuals deal with the extra costs of having a physical or mental health condition or disability.
The number of people claiming it has risen from around 2.4 million before the pandemic to four million this year in England and Wales. Reform says around £21bn of its planned £50bn savings would come from changes to health and disability benefits including PIP. While saying those with the most severe disabilities would be protected - Reform said around 2.89 million people in receipt of PIP will be "reassessed over time" which would lead to current payments being "modified or withdrawn" and replaced with its proposed "Disability Needs Assessment".
Analysts warn that these savings are by no means guaranteed. The Institute for Fiscal Studies think tank says there is "relatively little detail" about what Reform's plan entails. Another big element of Reform's planned cuts comes from taking away benefits from foreign nationals.
It claims around £20bn could be saved from its £50bn target if they were banned from getting benefits including Universal Credit (UC). More than a million UC claimants were born overseas including around 700,000 EU citizens who arrived in the UK before Brexit and have the right to live and work in the country. It's important to bear in mind that around half of EU citizens claiming UC are in employment.
The government doesn't provide figures for the number of foreign nationals claiming other benefits. But taking away these benefit rights would not be a simple thing to do because it risks putting the UK on a collision course with the EU. Around 4.5 million EU citizens have long-term settlement rights in the UK which means they are eligible to claim benefits.
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