Kemi Badenoch will say the welfare bill is "crushing our economy" when she sets out Conservative plans to cut more than £36bn a year from benefits spending in a speech on Tuesday.
The Conservative leader is expected to tell her audience that the welfare budget is now "more than the entire GDP of Ukraine", according to extracts released in advance of the speech. The party has published a 50-page document alongside it setting out how the savings would be found.
The speech marks the Conservatives' most detailed attempt yet to justify a figure that Ms Badenoch first announced at the party's conference in October and repeated in the Commons in her reply to John Healey's Budget. The £36bn is the party's own estimate and was revised up from a pledge of £23bn made a year earlier.
According to City AM, which has reported the contents of the document, the largest savings would come from no longer paying the standard rate of Personal Independence Payment for what the party calls "milder" mental health and neurodiversity conditions, naming anxiety, depression and ADHD. Changes to Motability, housing benefit and fraud and error are listed as making up the remainder.
The Independent, which first reported the speech, said the document also includes £2.8bn from replacing cash child Disability Living Allowance with non-cash support for children with mild learning and behavioural difficulties, and £1bn from tackling fraud and error.
Other measures were set out at the conference in October. They include bringing back the two-child limit, which the party costs at £3.1bn a year, and ending benefits for foreign nationals while honouring the rights of EU citizens with settled status, which the party puts at £9.5bn a year. A "Subsistence Allowance" set at 70 per cent of the Universal Credit standard allowance, for claimants who have been looking for work for more than six months without having paid enough National Insurance, is costed by the party at £0.5bn.
Ms Badenoch is also expected to say that "double amputees run marathons", City AM reported, while arguing that a safety net must remain for those who genuinely cannot work.
The welfare savings sit within a wider Conservative plan to cut spending in order to fund defence at 3 per cent of GDP by 2030 and reduce the deficit. Ms Badenoch told MPs in her Budget response: "We will cut spending by £70 billion including £36 billion from welfare." In the same debate she said the country was "drowning in an out-of-control welfare system".
Helen Whately, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said the benefits bill was out of control and accused Labour of ducking hard choices, adding that the government now admitted welfare spending would not fall on its watch.
Labour has previously responded that the Conservatives allowed welfare and debt to spiral out of control over 14 years in government, summing up the Tory message as "we broke it, now put us back in charge".
The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts total welfare spending, including the state pension, rising from £353bn in 2026/27 to £431bn in 2031/32. As a share of the economy the increase is smaller, from 11.1 per cent to 11.3 per cent of GDP. Ukraine's nominal GDP for 2026 is put at $229bn by the International Monetary Fund.
The proposal to restrict PIP for mental health conditions revives a contested area of policy. A 2017 change to PIP rules made by the then Conservative government was ruled by the High Court to be "blatantly discriminatory against those with mental health impairments", according to the Press Association.
Defending the party's separate plan to tighten Motability rules last year, Ms Badenoch said it was "fair, proportionate and reduce the burden on taxpayers".
No independent costing of the £36bn figure has been published. The OBR does not assess opposition policy.
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