Faiza Shaheen said she was "upset and shocked" by how a Labour government is treating people on benefits as if they're cheating
Faiza Shaheen, ex-Labour parliamentary candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green, has slammed the government’s planned disability benefit cuts, urging them to tax the ultra-rich instead.
During BBC Question Time last night, an audience member asked: “If the proposed benefit cuts are supposed to get people back to work, how do you genuinely ensure that genuinely unwell people are not going to be impoverished?”
Host Fiona Bruce then asked Shaheen whether she believed cuts to the government’s £65 billion incapacity benefit bill were necessary.
Shaheen said she opposes directly cutting people’s money, then added, to cheers from the audience: “It’s really striking isn’t it in the last few weeks, there’s always money for war, but not for the poor.”
The economist and activist said that her own mother had been on disability benefits, “She had heart failure, did she want heart failure? Absolutely not.”
Under Tory austerity, Shaheen said that the DWP “came, they harrassed her, it was absolutely heartbreaking to see”.
Shaheen, who ran as an independent candidate at the general election after being deselected by Labour, said she was “upset and shocked” that a Labour government is treating people on benefits as if they’re “all cheating”.
Emma Reynolds, Economic Secretary to the Treasury, said: “We’re not saying that”. Shaheen said “That is the implication for always going for this group of people”.
She went on to say there are “much better ideas” for saving money, including taxing the ultra-rich and introducing a 2% tax on individuals with over £10 million, which she said would generate £24 billion per year.
Bruce pointed out that many countries have introduced wealth taxes and “either abandoned them because they haven’t worked or because they have brought in so little money”.
She said: “So I worked with governments around the world actually, that were looking at this.
“And one thing they did was that they were very clear about what the money was going to be used for. They spoke about it in terms of solidarity. And so the public was really behind it. And so the rich knew that there wasn’t really much they could do to and argue against it.”
Paul Nowak has said the government must not make the same mistakes as the Tories
Paul Nowak, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress, has warned Keir Starmer that cutting Personal Independence Payment (PIP) “is not the solution” after 14 years of Tory austerity.
Furthermore, Nowak added that cutting disability will make current challenges worse and be unpopular with the public.
In a rare public criticism of the government, the TUC leader said: “A major lesson from the Tory years is that austerity damaged the nation’s health. We must not make the same mistake again.
“Pushing disabled people into hardship with cuts to support will only make the current challenges worse – and will not win public support.”
He added that “after 14 disastrous years of Tory rule”, a lot needs to be done to improve public services.
“But cutting PIP is not the solution – not least because it enables many disabled people to access work so that they do not have to rely on out of work benefits,” he said.
Nowak said that Labour should prioritise fixing problems with PIP, “with input from trade unions and organisations led by disabled people”.
Opposition to Labour’s plans for £5 billion in welfare spending cuts is growing. Over the weekend, Rachael Maskell MP expressed that Labour colleagues have voiced “deep, deep concern” about the proposed reforms.
On BBC Radio 4 this morning, Labour MP Nadia Whittome, said that the party is “getting it badly wrong” on welfare reform.
“It is not disabled people who crashed the economy or who were responsible for low wages or rising rents or falling living standards – we must not scapegoat them for the failures and political choices of Conservative governments,” she said.
Asked if she would rebel on this issue, Whittome, who was on disability benefits as a teenager, said: “I can’t look my constituents in the eye. I can’t look my mum in the eye and support this.”
Olivia Barber is a reporter at Left Foot Forward
The Hidden Face of Female Poverty in the UK
On International Women’s Day, Aisha Maniar looks at how poverty is holding back progress towards gender equality.
Poverty poses a major obstacle and block to progressing women’s rights and improving the lives of women and, subsequently, much of the rest of society all over the world. Women make up the majority of people living in poverty worldwide including the United Kingdom, the sixth largest economy in the world. International Women’s Day offers a timely opportunity to shed light on the often overlooked gendered nature of poverty in Britain today.
One in five, or 14.3 million people, in Britain currently live in poverty, defined by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation as individuals whose “resources are well below what is enough to meet your minimum needs, including taking part in society” (2025 UK Poverty report). For women, the figure is higher; they are likely to have a persistently low income, acquire debt and be more entrenched in poverty than men. Women from ethnic minorities and with disabilities experience poverty at higher rates, and there is also a north/south divide in the level and impact of female poverty.
Higher female poverty in the UK can be broadly attributed to the same factors as in many other countries in the world: lower pay, the gender pay gap, and the far higher burden of unpaid care work placed on women. Women contribute billions of pounds in unpaid care work annually to the economy and absorb the burden of many of the cuts to public and support services for children, the elderly and disabled.
With women holding almost two-thirds of low-paid, part-time and insecure jobs, opportunities to save and work themselves out of poverty and debt diminish. It also means that many women continue to experience poverty into retirement. In the past decade, the “the proportion of female pensioners in the UK living in poverty has increased by six percentage points”, with over 1.25 million female pensioners “living below the breadline.”
The impact is not just on earnings and savings but on all aspects of life. The stigma and shame attached to poverty mean that women very often suffer invisibly. Food poverty means many mothers reduce their food intake to ensure their children are properly fed. A 2023 Action Aid report found that period poverty increased by almost 20% in the year before.
One of the more visible aspects of widespread poverty in the UK today is homelessness. Women, for their own safety, are once again largely invisible. Government statistics report that women make up around 15% of rough sleepers nationwide. The first national women’s rough sleeping census held by Solace Women’s Aid in 2023 found that “In the 41 local areas that took part in the Census, 815 women were identified compared to just 189 through the Government’s Rough Sleeping Census.”
Off the streets, women make up over 60% of homeless adults in temporary accommodation, with this number having doubled in the past decade. Poor, unsuitable and precarious housing options for women add to the silent suffering, and often prevent women, with or without children, leaving abusive relationships and domestic violence.
A further invisible impact is on women’s health. Austerity measures have seen life expectancy fall over the past decade. The disparity in the life expectancy of the average woman and women living in poverty is almost one decade. For women experiencing sleeping rough, a life expectancy of 43 is almost half that of the average woman.
These are not just statistics but the everyday precarious living conditions and inequality experienced by millions of women across the UK. Poverty is not the result of the poor lifestyle choices of individuals but of deliberate punitive choices made by politicians.
There is much to be done to reverse growing gender inequality and the regression of women’s rights due to poverty. The current Labour government has failed thus far to take positive action, such as scrapping the two-child limit for universal credit support and addressing the detriment to millions of women affected by the rise in pension age.
Just some of the many steps that need to be taken immediately to address poverty and its impact on women’s rights in the UK include rethinking cuts to council budgets that force the burden of social care onto women as unpaid care work, increasing funding for women’s organisations who understand the particular challenges all kinds of women face, and public investment in childcare, making it affordable to allow women to access their rights and participate more fully and equally in society.
Aisha Maniar is a human rights activist.
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End gender pension and pay gap so millions won’t retire as poor as their grandmothers
The National Pensioners Convention is calling for an end to the iniquitous gender pension gap which leaves many women pensioners in poverty.
Ahead of International Women’s Day, the NPC is also calling for a bridging of the gender pay gap to allow today’s female workers to earn enough to afford higher pension contributions and avoid falling into the poverty trap like their grandmothers.
More than one in five women pensioners in the UK are estimated to live in poverty compared to one in four men, and the figure is higher among single women. Those, particularly older women who live alone, make up the biggest proportion of the two million pensioners currently living in poverty in the UK.
Research by the Pension Policy Institute (PPI) for their 2024 Gender Pensions Gap Report found women on average retire with pension savings of £69,000, compared to £205,000 for men. The report concluded: “In order to close this gap, a girl would need to start pension saving at just three years old.”
Jan Shortt, NPC General Secretary, said: “The theme of International Women’s Day on 8th March is a call to ‘Accelerate Action’ on gender equality. That’s why the NPC will be writing to the Ministers for Women and Equalities and the Department for Work and Pensions – Bridget Phillipson MP and Liz Kendall MP – urging them to end the iniquitous pensions gap that means millions of particularly older and vulnerable women are living in poverty.
“Most people do not understand our two-tier state pension system which means more than two thirds of our 12.5 million pensioners – those who retired before 2016 – receive much lower pensions than the new state pension figures often quoted in the press.”
The gap is largely due to older women in their late 70s, 80s and 90s who retired before 2016 having much lower state pensions, and occupational pensions because they took time out of work for family responsibilities. And they might not have been able to pay enough National Insurance to ensure that they even receive the basic/old rate.
Jan Shortt added: “The NPC is campaigning for everyone who retires – no matter their age, gender or contributions – to receive the same basic state pension, set at 70% of the living wage and above the official poverty level.
“No one should be penalised because of their circumstances from having a decent quality of life in retirement – and this starts with a decent income. But striving to bridge the gender pay gap to allow more women to afford higher personal pension contributions is equally important, and something any decent society should be committee to.”
The “NPC is also advocating for the WASPI women to receive the compensation the Ombudsman recommended and not be ignored by the government. Rightly, successive governments wanted to equalise the retirement age for men and women – but the way it was done for those ‘50s born WASPI women is grossly unfair.”
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