'UK benefits bill is economic suicide'

Tory leader unveils party's major welfare review

- BY STEPH SPYRO Deputy Political Editor

KEMI Badenoch has branded Britain's soaring benefits bill “economic suicide” while vowing to “draw a line” on which health issues are treated as disabilities.

The Conservative Party leader suggested some people are “gaming” the rules to get money. And she blasted a welfare culture so bloated that more than six million working-age adults are claiming benefits.

Speaking at Glazier Hall in Central London yesterday she said: “This is completely crazy.

“We're funding it by taxing businesses, taxing jobs, taxing wealth creators - the people in our country who get out of bed and make things happen. We're making life harder for them.

“This is economic suicide.” She claimed the system was not designed to handle “the age of diagnosis which we now live in”.

Her party “will review every circumstance in which benefits are paying more than work.

“We will undertake a full review of the level and operation of the household benefit cap, which currently acts more like a sieve, because most people on benefits avoid it through one exemption or another.