Reform UK has vowed to save £50bn from the welfare budget by slashing personal independence payments, banning foreign nationals from receiving benefits and forcing long-term claimants to do community work.
Unveiling the policies at a press conference, the party’s Treasury spokesman, Robert Jenrick, said the “broken” welfare system was a “moral and an economic catastrophe” and Reform would stop some claimants “taking everyone else for mugs”.
While the numbers and measures in Reform’s plan are eye-catching, there are reasons to suspect that delivering the policies will be complicated and Jenrick’s savings figures may be overambitious.
Eurostar rival finally gets go ahead – everything we know
Incoming Eurostar rival Virgin Trains has been granted track access for new services between London and Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam in 2030.
It marks a step closer to ending Eurostar’s monopoly. The trainline has operated without competition for nearly 32 years.
Approval lasts for 10 years
- The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) has given approval for Sir Richard Branson’s company to run up to 20 daily services through the Channel Tunnel between October 2030 to December 2040.
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Virgin Trains in Eurostar stations
- In October, Virgin Trains was told it could share Eurostar’s Temple Mills depot in east London.
- Temple Mills is the only depot that can be accessed from High Speed 1 – the line that runs between London and the tunnel.
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‘Still more work to do’
This is an important next step in bringing competition and growth to the market for international rail services, and we welcome the progress and London St Pancras High Speed have made. While there is still more work to do, we are supporting and the wider industry to grow international services.
Martin Jones, Deputy director of access and international
What next?
Despite just clearing a major regulatory hurdle, Virgin Trains has yet to secure access to other rail networks.
It must also obtain safety approvals from the ORR and relevant regulators in the EU before services start in 2030.
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The weather to expect for the rest of the summer
While temperatures are expected to drop this week after the UK’s fifth heatwave brought a record 38.1°C – it appears the relief will be only temporary.
Another heatwave is expected to descend on the UK next month, the Met Office has warned, after a month of unprecedented hot and dry conditions.
A September heatwave
The Met Office has predicted that there is a chance of a late-season heatwave developing in September as the UK moves into the meteorological autumn.
The forecaster said there was “a chance that late-season hot spells or heatwaves develop” in the south between 31 August and 14 September.
Northern areas to see ‘more changeable conditions’
The Met Office predicts “drier, more settled weather is slightly more likely towards the south and east. Temperatures are again likely to be near to or above average overall”.
While the south may see more heat, there will likely be “more changeable conditions” in the north and northwest of the country as autumn begins, the Met Office said.
Rain to fall after record dry July
Looking to the weekend, BBC Weather forecasts up to a 58 per cent chance of rain on Sunday, 23 August.
The following week could also see some rain, with BBC Weather predicting showers on Thursday, 28 August and Friday, 29 August – some respite after the driest July on record across England.
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Where does the Gaza peace deal stand?
US envoy Jared Kushner is in the Middle East today for talks with key figures, following a rare meeting with Hamas’s leader yesterday.
Last month, Donald Trump’s Board of Peace said it had reached an agreement for the “complete disarmament” of Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza.
Here’s what you need to know.
Israel rejects Gaza peace plan
Hamas deal
Trump said Hamas had agreed to disarm if Israel withdraws its forces from Gaza. Israel rejected the 15-point plan, which calls for Gaza to be rebuilt under a new civilian Palestinian administration.
The Hamas deal breakthrough came nine months after a US-brokered ceasefire was signed, with negotiations between Israel and Hamas largely deadlocked since then.
US envoy to meet Netanyahu
Netanyahu rejects plan
The Israeli PM said his military would not withdraw from Gaza, warning there would never be a Palestinian state in Gaza under his leadership.
US envoy in Middle East
Trump’s envoy Jared Kushner is expected to meet Netanyahu today to discuss the US-backed Gaza plan. He met with with Hamas leader Khalil al Hayya yesterday.
What happens next?
Eight Muslim countries issued a statement on Sunday condemning Israel’s rejection.
While it’s not yet clear whether Kushner’s talks will be successful, one topic at the heart of discussions will be the disarmament process.
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Why average house price plunged by £7,360 in August
Average house prices nosedived by more than £7,000 this month- marking the biggest August price fall since 2018, according to new figures.
Property site Rightmove said asking prices fell by 2 per cent, or £7,360 month-on-month.
Rightmove downgrades annual house price projections
While prices usually fall in August, this is a much bigger drop than the 10-year average of 1.3 per cent.
The figures prompted Rightmove to downgrade its annual house price forecast for 2026 from a 2 per cent increase to between 0 and a 2 per cent fall.
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What is influencing the figures?
The average asking price for a home in Britain stood at £364,999 in August – 1 per cent lower than a year ago.
And it’s all down to the supply.
- The number of available homes for sale is at a 12-year high for this time of year.
- This, combined with the quiet summer holiday period, has led to lower price expectations from sellers.
- Colleen Babcock, a property expert at Rightmove, said the larger-than-usual price drop is a sign sellers are pricing much more competitively from the offset.
- “Buyers have the widest choice of homes for sale at this time of year in more than a decade, so standing out on price for the right reasons is hugely important,” she said.
A regional divide in property prices
But not everywhere is experiencing a dampening in property prices – as usual, there is a regional divide, Rightmove said.
In the North West of England, average asking prices are up by 1.9 per cent annually, beating out homes in London where prices have sunk by 3.1 per cent on average.
- The depressed figures follow a “mini bounce” in buyer demand since Andy Burnham became PM.
- Buying activity, however, remains roughly 10 per cent below 2025 levels due to the changing picture for mortgage rates, geopolitical uncertainty and October’s Budget spooking potential buyers.
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Everything you need to know about Reform’s welfare overhaul
Reform UK is preparing to unveil the biggest shake-up of the welfare system “in a generation”, with plans to abolish personal independence payments (PIP) for working-age adults and save an estimated £50bn a year.
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‘We will not pretend this is painless’
Nearly three million people would see their disability or sickness payments withdrawn or changed under the plans.
The party’s treasury spokesman, Robert Jenrick, set out the proposals in an article for , ahead of a full 50-page policy paper due on Monday. He has acknowledged the human cost directly, writing: “We will not pretend this is painless.”
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What is Reform proposing?
- Reform would scrap PIP and the health element of universal credit for working-age adults. Both would be replaced with a new “health security allowance”, a single, regularly reviewed payment.
- Only claimants with “severe, enduring and high-risk” conditions would qualify for that cash support.
- Everyone else currently receiving disability-related payments would lose their cash entitlement altogether.
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A closer look at the detail
Those who would lose access to payments would instead be supported through council-run disability support accounts.
Reform estimates that 2.16 million would keep their present cash entitlement in full, while 2.89 million would see theirs modified or withdrawn.
Child payments impacted
- The party plans to extend the same approach to children’s benefits, aligning the system for anxiety, depression and ADHD with the adult changes, though only for new claimants.
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Plans modelled on Dutch system
Reform would also place a new obligation on businesses with more than five staff to take out “return to work cover” insurance, which would pay for the cost of an employee’s first two years off sick, rather than the state covering that cost through benefits.
The scheme is modelled on the Dutch system, where Reform argues disability benefit applications fell by 40 per cent after similar reforms were introduced.
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Scientists hail malaria breakthrough – what we know
A new compound has been hailed “an exciting step forward” in the fight against malaria – which kills hundreds of thousands of people each year.
Researchers at the University of Dundee, who discovered the compound, say it has the potential to simplify dosing regimens for the treatment and prevention of the illness.
A ‘novel drug-like molecule’
The new compound, called cabamiquine, is described as a “novel drug-like molecule” that can be delivered in a single dose.
An early-stage clinical trial showed that when administered with a commonly used antimalarial drug called pyronaridine, it is both effective and has a favourable safety profile in adults and adolescents.
Larger trials on the horizon
The team said the findings support the development of the combination therapy for larger trials and children.
In 2024, there were an estimated 282 million cases of malaria and 610,000 deaths from the disease worldwide. Figures have been rising in part due to resistance to common malaria medicines.
An ‘exciting step forward’
This is an exciting step forward for a compound which has great potential to simplify dosing regimens for , a disease which causes hundreds of thousands of deaths every year. We are delighted to see how the compound… is progressing into a potential medicine.
Dr Beatriz Baragana, a member of the Dundee University team that discovered cabamiquine
What are the details of Reform’s plan?
Reform’s policy has three main pillars.
The first relates to how the welfare system treats foreign nationals. Under the plan, foreign nationals would be excluded from most benefits.
The ban would include EU nationals with settled status in the UK, though there would be a few exemptions, such as armed forces veterans. Jenrick said such a ban would save £21bn by 2029.
Secondly, Reform would shake up disability benefits through a new system of “Return to Work Cover”. For the first two years of an employee being signed off sick, their employer would have to pay for them based on existing welfare rates. Jenrick said businesses would take out specialist insurance to cover this risk, offset by a cut to their national insurance contributions.
Those unable to return to work would go through a disability needs assessment, with a reduced caseload of eligible claimants receiving cash and in-kind support to help with living costs, Reform says. Jenrick said only the most vulnerable would get PIP, which would be reformed into a “PIP health security allowance”.
Lastly, people on universal credit for more than 12 months who are fit to work would be assigned to a welfare-to-work scheme, and required to provide 20 hours a week of community work arranged by their council.
If claimants were to refuse, they would “get nothing”, and if councils refused to run the schemes, they would “face cuts to their funding”, Jenrick added.
While that is the plan, it would face numerous hurdles, starting with the EU.
Renegotiating with the EU
Reform’s ban on foreign nationals receiving benefits would cover EU nationals who arrived in the UK before 2021 and have settled status. This would require a renegotiation of the Brexit withdrawal agreement.
However, it is not clear that Brussels would want to rewrite the agreement, and the bloc would likely respond with countermeasures such as stripping British expats of benefits. Brussels could even launch retaliatory trade measures against the UK.
Reform has allocated £500m of contingency funding to cover the potential cost of British citizens returning to the UK to claim benefits if their entitlement to welfare in the EU is withdrawn.
But the cash would only cover around 10 per cent – about 130,000 – of the 1.3 million British citizens living in the EU returning home to claim benefits.
It is also worth remembering that if Reform got into government, they would be embarking on the renegotiation at the same times as implementing other policies which would be almost certain to strain relations with Europe.
For example, Reform wants to use the Royal Navy to forcibly return migrants to French ports – something which France has said would violate its sovereignty and breach international law.
Asked by The i Paper whether Europe would really want to cut a deal with the UK against that backdrop, Jenrick said: “I think we can negotiate with the EU a hell of a lot better than Keir Starmer or Andy Burnham will do. I trust Nigel Farage to cut a good deal with the EU because he’s a strong leader who knows what he wants.”
Making employers pay for sick workers
Jenrick said Return to Work Cover would be modelled on the system used in the Netherlands. However, making employers liable for sick employees for two years could have unintended consequences.
Jenrick said his policy would give the “employers who know their workers best an incentive to help them back into work rather than pass the bill to the taxpayer”. He also said there would not be “any additional financial burden on businesses”, promising a “commensurate cut” of 0.2 per cent to employer national insurance contributions.
However, it is not clear whether this would be enough to offset the extra costs which employers would be incurring – something Jenrick himself admitted. “If it turns out the costs are higher than that, then we’ll consider that obviously,” he said.
Shifting the responsibility to employers could also create a perverse incentive for employers to not hire people with disabilities or previous experiences of ill-health.
Jenrick said he was alive to this risk and that the insurance which employers would take out would be structured not to create this incentive. “You can put in place robust non-discrimination procedures that mean those who are providing the insurance cover do not discriminate between sectors where there are higher levels of sickness, or between individuals,” he added.
But while Jenrick said employers must not discriminate, Reform is at the same time pledging a bonfire of equalities legislation, including the Equality Act and the Human Rights Act, and UK withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights.
Pushed by The i Paper on whether people would be able to challenge discrimination without these legal protections, Jenrick said: “Just because we see that Tony Blair’s legislation and the Equality Act has been a failure… does not mean for one minute that we would do anything to reverse the good steps our country has made over the course of my lifetime on disability discrimination, race discrimination, equal pay for women, support for women on maternity to get back into the workplace.”
Voter backlash
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) said much of Reform’s plans remainws vague. “Most of the planned savings here would come from a new disability needs assessment which is intended to be substantially tougher,” said Tom Waters, an associate director at the IFS.
“But there is relatively little detail on what the new assessment would actually entail or on how they would avoid the experience of previous attempts to toughen up the system, which saw savings falling significantly short of government’s expectations.”
Finally, there are the political implications of the measures. Many of Reform’s top target seats have large PIP caseloads. The welfare plans could therefore open up a vulnerable new flank for Burnham’s resurgent Labour Party.