BBC and Sky News fail to explain why presenters do not push back on claims of ‘spiralling welfare spending’

Two major broadcasters have been unable to explain why key news presenters are failing to challenge politicians and commentators who repeatedly claim – wrongly – that spending on social security is out of control and needs to be cut.

Presenters at both BBC News and Sky News were asked this week by Disability News Service (DNS) why their journalists failed to dispute the claims and even made such statements themselves.

Disabled campaigners and DNS have been highlighting for months how spending on social security is roughly stable as a proportion of GDP* – apart from a small rise since the start of the pandemic – and is predicted to stay at the same level over the next five years.

Meanwhile, a minister and a Liberal Democrat both spoke out in a Commons debate this week to tell fellow MPs that it was not spiralling.

Despite these and similar – occasional – interventions, high-profile presenters such as Cathy Newman, for Sky News, and the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire, have been failing to challenge the myth that it is “spiralling out of control”.

Newman, a highly-respected journalist who has recently moved to Sky from Channel 4 News to present her own early-evening programme, The Cathy Newman Show, appears to be one of the worst offenders for pushing the need to cut social security spending.

On 24 June, when questioning former Conservative chancellor Jeremy Hunt about his wish for benefit cuts, she failed to question the impact of such reductions or whether they were necessary, instead asking him: “But your welfare plan, it takes time to get those cuts that you’re talking about, doesn’t it?

“And the defence budget needs the money starting to roll now, doesn’t it?”

On 11 June, in an interview with Labour’s former defence minister Al Carns, Newman said: “But you have got to look at cutting welfare, haven’t you?

“The welfare budget, if you look at that compared to the defence budget…”

She then asked him: “Does the prime minister have the authority to drive that through the backbenches? He didn’t last time.”

When interviewing Reform’s Robert Jenrick on 23 June, she used misleading figures – similar to those Conservatives have used in parliament – to suggest that most out-of-work claimants could receive up to £49,000 in benefits, without pointing out that such claimants would likely have significant disability-related costs and barriers.

She then failed to challenge Jenrick when he made his own misleading claims about disability benefits.

With the BBC, Newsnight presenter Lucy Hocking asked on Friday’s show whether prime-minister-in-waiting Andy Burnham would “be the one that is actually going to cut welfare in order to give more money to defence?”

When Kate Ferguson, the Sun on Sunday’s political editor, claimed “the welfare budget is out of control”, Hocking failed to challenge her or point out that it was stable.

On Sunday morning, Victoria Derbyshire, another highly-respected journalist, said about Burnham on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg: “Is it weird to you that the country doesn’t know how he would deal with some of the really big issues like funding defence properly, or dealing with President Trump, or how to bring down welfare spending, and he could be prime minister in three weeks?”

James Landale, the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent, said on the broadcaster’s Newscast programme on 16 February: “Increasingly, more important people are saying this needs to be a whole of society argument that ultimately whoever is in government over the next decade is going to have to increase defence spending to a point that stretches the social contract in a way it hasn’t for years, because it will require ultimately less being spent on welfare, less being spent on health, less being spent on education, and all pensions and all of that that will require political leadership…”

Another example also came from Newscast, where presenters frequently refer to the need to cut social security spending.

During its review of the year episode on 24 December 2025, the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg said that “many people in the Labour movement” would say that Sir Keir Starmer “ditching his welfare reforms” last summer was “the moment when they really gave up on being a reforming government… we got the budget we got because of the welfare changes that we didn’t have”.

Neither Sky News nor BBC News accepted the suggestion from DNS this week that its presenters were failing to push back on the “accepted wisdom” that social security spending was out of control and needed to be cut, when in fact it was stable.

DNS had pointed to Office for Budget Responsibility figures which show that social security spending is not spiralling.

It had also suggested that there were good reasons for challenging the call for cuts to disability benefits.

It pointed out that there could be several reasons why personal independence payment (PIP) spending has been increasing, including the impact of the pandemic, NHS waiting-lists, and an ageing population; that levels of PIP fraud are tiny; that disabled people are much more likely to be in poverty than non-disabled people, which would worsen if disability benefits were cut; and that cuts to Department for Work and Pensions disability support have been closely associated with countless deaths over the last 16 years, many of them suicides.

Sky News declined to produce a statement in response to the concerns about The Cathy Newman Show.

But it claimed it was committed to impartial, rigorous journalism and holding all sides of a debate to account; that its presenters regularly scrutinise politicians and public figures across a wide range of issues; and that social security policy was not the primary focus of the interviews in the examples provided by DNS.

It also claimed that editorial decisions and interview lines are determined by the subject matter, the news agenda and the time available and that its journalists are committed to rigorous, fair and impartial scrutiny of all guests.

Sky News also claimed that it regularly featured a range of perspectives on social security, disability benefits and social care.

BBC News did not respond to the concerns about its presenters.

Instead, it said in a statement: “Social security and welfare is an important issue for our audiences.

“We cover a wide range of perspectives on welfare spending and aim to reflect a breadth of viewpoints across our output.”

DNS understands that the concerns it raised this week have been passed to the relevant editorial teams at both BBC News and Sky News.

Meanwhile, Labour’s employment minister, Dame Diana Johnson, told MPs on Tuesday that she wanted to “put things into context on welfare spending”.

She said: “Since this time last year, we have 400,000 more people in employment, and welfare spending as a percentage of GDP continues to be broadly stable, as it has been for many years.

“We have slowed the increase in the number of people coming into health and disability benefits, but that is where spending is increasing most.”

Liberal Democrat John Milne, a member of the Commons work and pensions committee, had earlier told MPs: “Right now, it is hard to get through a day without someone, somewhere, saying [wrongly] that welfare spending is ballooning out of control.”

He also highlighted the incorrect claim by the Conservatives that “for the first time ever, the total welfare bill is now higher than total receipts from income tax”.

This claim has resulted in Kemi Badenoch being sent her second letter in two months by the UK Statistics Authority about an untrue claim on social security by her party.

Milne said: “Remarkably, as a percentage of GDP, the amount we spend on welfare today is roughly the same as it was under Maggie Thatcher 40 years ago.

“Today’s welfare bill is simply not the cause of our economic problems, and neither can it be the sole solution.”

He said there was a “false characterisation of a scrounger culture” and that “basing national policy around the minority of claimants who do not want to help themselves is the surest way never to fix our benefit system”.

Despite these comments, outgoing prime minister Sir Keir Starmer failed to question the need for cuts to social security spending when Badenoch repeatedly suggested in prime minister’s questions yesterday (Wednesday) that the only solution to what she claimed was the need for more defence spending was to “cut welfare”.

Instead, Sir Keir pointed to how much “welfare” had risen under the Conservatives, without pointing out that social security spending remained stable as a proportion of GDP*.

*The proportion of GDP (the size of the country’s economy in a particular year) spent on social security, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR): 2010-11: 12.0%, 2011-12: 12.0%, 2012-13: 12.1%, 2013-14: 11.7%, 2014-15: 11.5%, 2015-16: 11.3%, 2016-17: 10.9%, 2017-18: 10.5%, 2018-19: 10.3%. 2019-20: 10.2%, 2020-21: 11.9%, 2021-22: 10.4%, 2022-23: 10.0%, 2023-24: 10.9%, 2024-25: 10.7%, 2025-26 (latest OBR forecast): 10.9%, 2026-27 (latest OBR forecast): 11.2%, 2027-28 (latest OBR forecast): 11.1%, 2028-29 (latest OBR forecast): 11.0%, 2029-30 (latest OBR forecast): 11.1%, 2030-31 (latest OBR forecast): 11.2% [see chart 5.2, Economic and fiscal outlook – October 2024 and table 4.1, Economic and Fiscal Outlook – March 2026]

Picture: Cathy Newman (left) and Victoria Derbyshire