Shadow minister says parents don’t ‘game’ SEND system… but Kemi says disabled adults do ‘game’ the benefits system

A Tory shadow minister has said that accusing parents of “gaming the system” to secure support for their disabled children is “populist BS*”, just hours after his leader accused many disabled adults of doing exactly that when claiming benefits.

The contrasting comments again expose the hypocrisy of the false and misleading claims of some senior party figures as they try to justify £36.1 billion a year of cuts to social security, while others attempt to win the backing of parents who are trying to secure support for their disabled children.

Saqib Bhatti, the party’s shadow education minister, told a fringe meeting at the party’s conference in Birmingham on Sunday (pictured) that parents of children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) were not “playing the system”.

He said the accusation had been made by Reform UK politicians – following an increase in the number of families seeking education, health and care plans for their children – and “we need to call it out for what it is, we shouldn’t let them get away with that”.

He told the fringe event, hosted by the NASUWT education union, that reasons for the increased number of families seeking support included the impact of the Covid pandemic.

He added – referring to comments made last year by Reform’s Richard Tice about children using ear defenders in classrooms and parents “abusing the system”: “Clearly the numbers are going higher but as I say, anyone who says, what was the thing about headphones, and gaming the system, and all this stuff, I have zero patience for that.”

But Bhatti was speaking just hours after the BBC aired an interview with Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch, in which she claimed there had been an “explosion” in the number of disabled people claiming disability benefits for “low level conditions which they can work with, ADHD, anxiety, these are conditions that work would actually help them with”.

She said: “Because of the stopping face-to-face assessments during Covid – understandable reasons – people have worked out how to game the system.

“I don’t believe that’s right.”

Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) research, published last month, found “little evidence that face-to-face, telephone and video assessments produce materially different award outcomes”.

Asked repeatedly by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg how many disabled people she thought were “cheating the system”, Badenoch said she did not have the figures but would send them to the BBC later because her shadow work and pensions secretary Helen Whately and shadow chancellor Andrew Griffith had “done this work”.

Her team later sent figures to the BBC that made no reference to disability benefit fraud but stated that – according to Kuenssberg – “nearly £10 billion is paid out fraudulently or in error and nearly seven per cent of universal credit claims are fraudulent”.

If she had sent the BBC the figures for personal independence payment (PIP) fraud, they would have shown that just 1.4 per cent of PIP payments were fraudulent in 2025-26, according to DWP.

Asked by Disability News Service about his comments after the fringe meeting, and the contrast with those made by his party leader, Bhatti said he had not seen the Kuenssberg interview, but he added: “What she’ll be talking about is that proliferation of the benefits bill, certainly on the lower end of things.

“We were talking [in the fringe meeting] about diagnoses; the rates of diagnoses have gone up because we have got better at diagnosing.

“What Kemi would have been talking about is people knowing how the system worked and trying to get on the benefit system, [whereas] I would like to think we have a system [in SEND] that recognises real disability and makes sure those people who need support get that support.”

Asked to clarify that he believed that there was not “gaming of the system” in SEND but there was in disability benefits, he said: “Well, I don’t agree with the framing of your question because what Kemi would have been talking about was those people who understand how to game the system to be able to do that.

“If there’s a genuine need for disability, I don’t think anyone’s talking about taking away benefits from those, and I think that’s the…”

He declined to comment further.

*Bullshit