Tories plan to stop ADHD child benefit cash in £2.8bn welfare cut

The Conservatives have pledged to stop paying Disability Living Allowance to families of children with what they call milder behavioural disorders, learning difficulties or ADHD. The party says the change alone would save £2.8bn a year, part of a wider package it claims would cut £36bn from the welfare budget. Shadow work and pensions secretary Helen Whately said the current system risked putting children on a conveyor belt towards a lifetime on benefits.

Child DLA pays parents between £30.30 and £194.60 a week to cover the extra costs of raising a disabled child, and claimants must show difficulty getting about or a need for more care than a child of the same age without a disability. Under the Tory plan, only cases judged to be highest need — roughly 30% — would keep cash payments. The remaining 70% would lose the money and instead be offered support through mental health services and family hubs, which the party says it will fund with £1bn. The changes would apply to new claims and reassessments, and children with physical disabilities would be exempt.

The Conservatives brand child DLA the fastest growing benefit in the UK's welfare system, pointing to government statistics showing 521,476 cases in 2020 and 914,000 now. The ADHD policy sits alongside cuts the party had already announced: £13.7bn from sickness and disability benefits by restricting payments to claimants with milder mental health issues and neurodiversity conditions such as anxiety, depression and ADHD, £9.5bn by making it harder for foreign nationals to claim, £4.5bn from local housing allowance, £3.1bn from reintroducing the two-child benefit cap, and £1bn from tackling fraud.

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch defended the approach, saying millions of people contribute to the economy, their families and their communities even when they face serious challenges. She pointed to double amputees running marathons, housebound people doing creative work from home and people with autism running some of the biggest tech companies in the world. Badenoch argued that telling a young person their ADHD means they are defective and will never amount to anything is likely to be more destructive to their future than the condition itself.

Labour came out swinging, calling the plan a charter for homelessness and human misery that would push people into hardship and end up costing the state more. A party spokesperson said the Conservatives designed and implemented the benefit system that has driven large numbers of people to be signed off and written off, and pointed to Labour's push to fix collapsed face-to-face assessments, personalised employment support for sick and disabled people and the Youth Guarantee. The government says it wants to bring the benefits bill down but has set no timetable, with reviews by former minister Alan Milburn on young people not in education, employment or training and by Minister Sir Stephen Timms on disability benefits both due in November. Whately said Milburn was rolling the pitch for more welfare spending, adding there was no doubt savings can be made from welfare, only that Labour does not want to make them.

The Child Poverty Action Group condemned the proposals outright, warning they would take the UK back to the dark ages and cause the biggest overnight increase in child poverty since records began.