A New Welfare Row Has Broken Out in Parliament - What It Actually Says, and What Kent's Own Numbers Show

A new row over welfare spending has broken out in Parliament this month, after the Government confirmed that 200,000 UK families received more in total benefits and tax credits last year than the average worker earns in a salary. Here's what was actually said, what the Government's own figures put in context, and what we could - and couldn't - find out about how this looks in Kent specifically.

The figure came from a written answer given by DWP minister Baroness Sherlock, after Lord Truscott asked the Government to disclose how many households received more support than the average national wage. The answer: around 200,000 families received more than £39,039 - the average annual wage cited - across the 2024-25 financial year. That total isn't just Universal Credit; it combines several forms of support together, including tax credits, the State Pension and Personal Independence Payment (PIP).

A DWP spokesperson responded to the figures by pointing out how rare the very highest amounts are: "Last year, the amount of people receiving awards over £30,000 was under two per cent of the total." In other words, the households in this story are a small slice of all benefit claimants, and the Government's position is that they are overwhelmingly cases of high need - most commonly where a family includes someone with a severe disability requiring several forms of support at once, rather than someone simply choosing benefits over work.

The Conservative response came from shadow work and pensions secretary Helen Whately - the MP for Faversham and Mid Kent, though that's a mid-Kent seat rather than one of the four West Kent constituencies we usually cover - who argued: "Our welfare system is so out of touch it pays those on benefits more than those who go to work." Prime Minister Andy Burnham defended the Government's approach, saying: "Yes, we do everything to support our national security - but it cannot come at the expense of social security."

We looked for a Kent-specific version of this same figure and couldn't find one - the £39,039 breakdown appears to exist only as a UK-wide total, with no regional or local authority split published. What Kent County Council does publish is a different measure: total benefit claimant numbers by area, which don't tell us how many local households exceed the average-wage threshold, but do show the general scale of welfare support across the county. As of the most recent figures, Maidstone had around 52,772 people claiming at least one DWP benefit, Tonbridge & Malling around 37,049, Sevenoaks around 35,083, and Tunbridge Wells around 32,565 - with Tunbridge Wells recording the steepest rate of increase in Universal Credit claims of anywhere in Kent during the pandemic years. These are two genuinely different measures, and we don't want to imply otherwise: the national row is about a small number of high-support households, while Kent's own figures are simply a headcount of everyone claiming anything.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the political argument, it lands against a backdrop of cost-of-living pressure that's been a recurring theme on this site recently, from this month's fuel price rises to the ongoing squeeze on household budgets across all four boroughs. Sources: London Business News, Kent County Council