£4,485 Per Taxpayer: What Working-Age Benefits Now Cost, as Badenoch Unveils £36bn of Cuts

News | By Matt, Editor

Every taxpayer in Britain is paying an average of £4,485 this year towards working-age benefits. That’s a £183 billion bill split across HMRC’s 40.8 million taxpayers, The Telegraph worked out.

Kemi Badenoch put the number at the heart of her welfare plan today. “Britain is now handing out more than £180 billion a year in benefits to working-age adults,” she said in speech extracts released by the Conservatives. “It is more than £4,000 for every taxpayer in the UK.”

Key facts

• Working-age welfare: about £183bn this year, or £4,485 per taxpayer (The Telegraph, using HMRC figures).
• All welfare, state pensions included, is forecast to climb from £333bn to £407bn within five years (The Telegraph).
• The Tory plan claims £36.1bn a year of savings: £13.7bn from sickness and disability benefits, £9.5bn from ending claims by foreign nationals without EU settled status, £3.1bn from bringing back the two-child cap (politics.co.uk).
• Richard Tice says Reform has already announced benefit cuts of “over £40 billion per year”.

The checks that got dropped

Labour isn’t short of chances to save money here. Chancellor John Healey has scrapped Rachel Reeves’s plan to check Universal Credit claimants’ savings before they’re paid, The Telegraph reported. About £1bn of Universal Credit is overpaid through incorrect declarations, according to the Mail.

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The DWP says the old plan relied on claimants’ consent, and that its replacement, which makes banks flag accounts meeting set criteria, will save £1.2bn by 2030-31.

Shadow work and pensions secretary Helen Whately said: “The benefits bill is out of control. Labour has ducked the hard choices and now admits welfare spending will not fall on their watch.”

Labour hit back: “The Tories let the welfare bill soar on their watch… In the Tories’ last year in government, the welfare bill rose by a record £33 billion.” (politics.co.uk)

Tories allowed welfare costs to SOAR

Reform announced cuts to benefits – over £40 billion per year

Now Tories copying Reform again!

Never forget what Tories did

Never forgive

https://t.co/wrXncwwmND

— Richard Tice MP 🇬🇧 (@TiceRichard) November 10, 2026

It’s the same row that pushed Zia Yusuf to call for an end to benefits for foreign nationals last week: Yusuf Demands Ban on UK Benefits for Foreign Nationals After £23bn Bill.

Our view: Forget who copied whom. That £4,485 comes out of the same pockets every year, the ones belonging to people who get up and go to work, and they deserve a date when it starts coming down.

Sources

• The Telegraph, 9 November 2026: £183bn, 40.8m taxpayers, £4,485, £333bn to £407bn
• politics.co.uk, 10 November 2026: Tory £36.1bn breakdown, Badenoch extracts, Labour response
• The Independent, 9 November 2026: Whately quote, £9.5bn foreign nationals measure
• The Telegraph, 8 November 2026 and Daily Mail: Universal Credit savings checks scrapped, DWP statement
• Richard Tice on X

Main image: Kemi Badenoch, official portrait, Roger Harris / House of Commons, CC BY 3.0, with Jobcentre Plus, City Road, Chester, Jeff Buck, CC BY-SA 2.0.