The popular claim that welfare spending is spiralling out of control does not survive contact with the data. According to analysis by the Resolution Foundation, once accounting errors are stripped out, non-pensioner welfare spending stands at roughly the same level as it was in the mid-1990s. Ruth Curtice, the foundation’s chief executive, said she was prompted to examine the figures after suspecting that widely shared charts showing a surge in Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) spending were misleading. The errors, she explained, included the fact that the introduction of Universal Credit shifted vast tax-credit spending previously paid by HM Revenue & Customs onto the DWP books, making welfare appear to balloon. They also mistakenly categorised child disability allowances as adult payments.
The “out-of-control welfare” trope, long a staple of right-wing politics, has gained renewed currency as the Government faces twin pressures over defence and social spending. The BBC Verify unit recently stated that “defence spending has fallen as welfare spending has risen” – a claim the Resolution Foundation challenges as fundamentally flawed. In reality, Britain’s non-pensioner welfare bill is flat in historical terms, and UK benefits are among the stingiest in the developed world. Universal Credit currently pays £98 a week, which is 9 per cent lower in real terms than in 2010.
Resignations expose defence funding crisis
The defence side of the debate has been thrown into turmoil by the resignations of Defence Secretary John Healey and Armed Forces Minister Al Carns on 11 June 2026. Both quit over the Government’s Defence Investment Plan (DIP), which they argued fell “well short of what is required” at a time of “rising threats”. Healey said the Treasury had been “unwilling to commit the resources that the nation needs”. The proposed plan would see defence spending rise to only 2.68 per cent of GDP by 2030, after reaching 2.6 per cent the previous year.
Healey’s successor, Dan Jarvis, a former Parachute Regiment officer, now faces the same daunting arithmetic. The Prime Minister has pledged to boost defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027 and 3 per cent by 2035 – a target many in the military already consider too slow. Britain’s current military expenditure stood at 2.28 per cent of GDP in 2024, up from 2.23 per cent the year before. While this places the UK roughly level with Germany, slightly ahead of France, and well ahead of Canada, Italy and Spain, all Nato allies face pressure to spend more as the United States dials back its commitment. Countries near the Russian border already spend considerably more.
Yet the Ministry of Defence has a poor record on value for money. The Public Accounts Committee has repeatedly criticised wild overspending and delays. The National Audit Office again refused to fully verify MoD accounts last year. The £6 billion Ajax armoured vehicle project was eight years late and remains faulty. Dreadnought-class submarines are a decade behind schedule. Two aircraft carriers cost twice their original price and are considered too vulnerable to sail. The Aukus pact with Australia and the US, under which Australia will acquire nuclear-powered submarines, carries an Australian cost projection of $368 billion over 30 years. The Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) is another hugely expensive commitment; a stopgap contract was signed last month to keep work going for three months.
Al Carns, a former Royal Marine colonel, warned that “the machinery of government itself has been left to decay”, with decision-making too slow and departments fighting each other rather than external threats. He said a serious country funds its defence “to meet the threat it actually faces, not the threat it wishes it faced”.
Pension spending is the real driver
If there is a welfare budget that is genuinely soaring, it is the state pension. Ruth Curtice at the Resolution Foundation made the point bluntly: “Why pick on non-pensioner welfare anyway? Pensions are where the welfare budget skyrockets.”
Every war now shows up on your energy bill. Defence isn't separate from the economy any more. It is the economy.
And the countries that invest in it get to write the rules. Everyone else lives by them. pic.twitter.com/YBMN4CEDa6
— Al Carns (@AlistairCarns) June 12, 2026
The triple lock – which guarantees the state pension rises by the highest of average earnings, inflation, or 2.5 per cent – has created what the Resolution Foundation and the Institute for Fiscal Studies call a “ratchet effect”. Over the last 20 years pensioners have seen three times as much living standards growth as non-pensioners. The IFS estimates that the triple lock will cost £15.5 billion more per year by the end of this parliament than if the state pension had been linked to average earnings since the early 2010s. The Office for Budget Responsibility calculates that simply keeping the pension rise equal to average earnings would have saved £12.6 billion by 2029.
Despite its expense, the triple lock has been “remarkably ineffective at reducing poverty”, according to the Resolution Foundation. Pensioner poverty fell by 15.8 percentage points in the 15 years before the lock was introduced, but rose by 2.3 percentage points in the 12 years after. Lord Richard Walker, the Government’s cost of living tsar, has called the policy “mathematically unsustainable” and “profoundly unfair”. Reformers propose replacing it with a smoothed earnings link that could save £650 million a year by the end of the parliament, or a “lifespan fund”. However, the grey vote frightens all parties: Labour’s manifesto pledged to keep the triple lock, and the Conservatives, despite their talk of welfare cuts, remain silent on the issue.
Political theatre and the real trade-off
The warfare-versus-welfare framing is explicitly promoted by the Conservative Party. Shadow Defence Secretary James Cartlidge has said: “Our brave armed forces are crying out for resources. But the PM is more interested in doling out benefits.” The party’s pitch is to “cut welfare spending by £23bn and get Britain working again”.
Some Labour figures have flirted with similar language. Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, said in a recent interview that he would not be “squeamish” about reducing the welfare bill to fund defence, but he advocated a “preventative” approach that invests in getting people into work rather than crude cuts. He also suggested defence spending could support apprenticeships and British industry – “maximum social return”, as he put it.
Despite the political noise, the two budgets are essentially disconnected. Spending on working-age benefits was lower than defence in the mid-1980s, but defence spending collapsed after the Cold War. The non-pensioner benefit bill is projected at 4.3 per cent of GDP by the end of the decade in an older, sicker society, while defence is promised to reach 3 per cent in the 2030s. Cash is hard to squeeze from any department, but the core of the welfare budget – support for working-age people – is already lean by international standards. In an OECD comparison of 38 countries’ social spending, the UK ranked 17th. When gross public social spending is measured including health, the UK spent 22.5 per cent of GDP in 2022, very close to the OECD average of 21 per cent.
The real choice, experts argue, is not between guns and butter for the poorest. It is between an honest debate about the triple lock and the manufactured panic over disability benefits and the two-child limit – a policy that would impoverish more than 400,000 children. Pensioners are half as likely to be poor as children, yet the political class dare not touch the largest escalator in the welfare budget.
