A welfare reform to test the Coalition's resolve Among the more startling forecasts produced by George Osborne in his Budget a few weeks ago was that welfare will soon consume one third of all public spending - even after the benefit overhaul carried out by the Coalition. The Welfare Reform Act which became law in the last session of Parliament represents the latest, and most ambitious, attempt to get a grip on these unsustainable costs. For many recipients the repercussions have come as a shock, with caps on housing grants forcing people living in some parts of London to move home, and tougher checks on the qualification for incapacity benefit. But the most contentious reform of all is about to begin, as Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, explains in his interview with this newspaper today. He wants to scrap the Disability Living Allowance (DLA), a benefit that provides a cash contribution towards the extra needs arising from an impairment or health condition, and replace it with the Personal Independence Payment, which would usually be granted for a limited period, after which claimants would have to be reassessed. This proposal almost led to defeat in the Lords on the Welfare Reform Act and is bitterly opposed by disability rights groups. As many as 500,000 current recipients could lose out. There are now 3.2 million people receiving DLA and forecast expenditure on the benefit for 2011/12 is £12.6 billion. In just nine years, the number claiming DLA has risen from just under 2.5 million to 3.2 million - an increase of around a third. Partly this is to do with demographic factors; but there has been no other obvious cause for such a rapid expansion in that period. Clearly something has gone wrong and the Government is right to establish what it is. One obvious problem is that the circumstances and needs of recipients are rarely reassessed. There are 130,000 people who have been claiming the benefit for 20 years, without anyone ever checking that they still need it. This is not an easy issue and when the Labour government tried to reform the DLA in 1997 it dropped the idea after protesters chained themselves to the railings of Downing Street. But it was the last administration's failure to pursue welfare reform that is the principal reason why costs have soared to intolerable levels, making the necessary readjustment all the more painful. There will inevitably be distressing stories of people, including soldiers, with disabilities losing their allowance that will test the Government's resolve to see this through. But the fact is that if nothing is done to curb welfare bills further, then the full weight of spending restraint will fall on other parts of an already beleaguered public sector.