Kemi Badenoch MP sets out our plan to Get Britain Working Again

Today [Tuesday 9^th December 2025], Kemi Badenoch MP, Leader of the Conservative Party, gave a speech to set out the Conservative Party's plan to Get Britain Working Again.

In her speech, Kemi Badenoch MP said:

“On Friday I worked a shift in a café with James Cleverly, the Shadow Housing Secretary.

It's been a long time since I worked behind a till serving customers.

James and I are former Secretaries of State, former cabinet ministers.

But we started out working in shops, cafes.

My first job was in McDonald's.

We didn't start out at the top, we started out at the bottom and worked our way up.

I bet many of you here this morning have similar stories.

Bu we are seeing today a lot of people not taking jobs, because they think those jobs are beneath them.

The Conservative Party believes in the dignity of work.

That's why James and I decided to do a shift at this café.

At the end of the shift, we sat down and spoke to the owner, Ruth, and her story was heartbreaking.

She has had an incredibly difficult time.

She had recently been through a divorce lost her house.

And yet she was getting up every single day to come into work and run her business.

I asked her how Labour's Budget had impacted her.

And she burst into tears.

Not only is she going to have to pay yet more in tax after being promised by the Chancellor last year that she wouldn't.

But millions of people who refuse to work.

The sort of people who turn their noses up at a job in cafés, they are going to be rewarded.

Labour's Budget was for Benefits Street.

They send a very clear message.

If you work hard, and do the right thing, you will get less.

And if you are on benefits, you will get more.

Right now, in Britain there are more than 6 million working-age people claiming benefits instead of working.

That's more than the entire population of Norway.

Who we are paying to sit at home.

And where is the money coming from to pay these people to sit at home?

How are we funding that?

By taxing businesses, taxing jobs, taxing wealth creators.

The people in our country who get out of bed and make things happen.

This is economic suicide.

Britain will get poorer, and more ambitious countries will one by one, overtake us.

What last month's Budget showed.

Is that Labour have given up on people like Ruth.

Last year they raised taxes and destroyed jobs.

And because of that we now have hundreds of thousands fewer people in work.

A million more people are claiming Universal Credit since last year's Budget.

They could have done something about this.

They could have changed course, brought taxes down, backed business.

But instead, they taxed hard-working people to pay for benefits.

They do not have the ideas to create growth and get Britain working again.

So, they have retreated into their comfort zone.

And now, because of the political pressure they are under Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are more interested in saving their own jobs, than creating jobs.

Labour will claim that they raised taxes to eradicate child poverty.

We need to take on this argument that raising taxes on working people is the best way to eradicate poverty.

It isn't.

They believe the way to end poverty is to give money to people in poverty until they are not in poverty anymore.

This has never worked.

The best way to get children out of poverty is for their parents to have jobs and for those jobs to pay well.

We also need to challenge bad metrics and wrong assumptions.

Let's start with the metric of relative poverty which Labour use.

“Relative poverty” just tells you what proportion of households earn below 60 per cent of median income.

That is not a measure of poverty at all.

It is a bad measure, because in a booming economy, as incomes rise, more people can be classed as being in poverty even though their real income is rising.

And during a recession, like we had under the last Labour Government where GDP collapsed, and unemployment went through the roof, relative poverty fell, even though we were all poorer.

I have long said that Britain is at risk of becoming a welfare state with an economy attached.

Well under Labour, there won't be an economy to attach for much longer.

In Hackney alone, 1,000 families on benefits with 5 or 6 children stand to gain £74 million from the lifting of the two-child benefit cap.

Some of those families will be getting more than £14,000 extra a year.

At the Budget, income tax thresholds were frozen.

Do you know how many people's thresholds were frozen just to pay for those families in Hackney?

340,000 taxpayers.

To pay for 1,000 families.

No wonder people are angry.

While those on the minimum wage agonise over whether they can afford another child.

People on benefits will get paid an extra £3,500 for every child they have because Labour is lifting the two-child benefit cap.

We know that worklessness is often passed down through generations.

Last year, we saw the fastest increase of children in workless households we've ever had.

There are now more children in the UK growing up in households where no one works than the entire population of Estonia.

This is heartbreaking, and the Government should be doing everything in their power to fix it.

We could spend all day listing all the things Labour is getting wrong but that's almost too easy.

Our job is not to moan, our job is to fix.

I worry about what the country will be like after 4 more years of Labour. 

But I know we have to be ready to deal with the mess they leave behind.

Adam Smith once said, “There is a lot of ruin in a nation.”   

For all that is going wrong now, and let's be honest has gone wrong in the past nations can absorb shocks. 

The financial crisis, Brexit, Covid.

Countries with strong institutions and productive people do not collapse overnight.

Even foolish policies take time to do real, lasting damage.

A crisis is serious, but it is not fatal unless governments keep repeating the mistakes.

We made mistakes in government, but we have learned from them. 

That's why we have a plan and we're building on it.

We need to get people into jobs.

We have a jobs crisis.

Since Labour came into office, unemployment has risen every single month.

Someone has to do the work to turn this around.

So, Conservatives are going to make it our crusade to Get Britain Working again.

Every person who gets off benefits and into work.

Is a double whammy for growth.

We stop paying them to sit at home and they start paying into the system.

This is how we reduce the tax burden – especially on businesses who then create more opportunity and more jobs.

This is the opposite of Labour's current doom loop, where they raise taxes and kill jobs, so they need to raise even more taxes.

My team and I have worked out some of the fixes that could start today.

We identified £23 billion of savings.

Like restricting benefits to British citizens.

Reducing eligibility for low level mental health issues.

And more.

We could do that today, but we all know, it's not enough.

Some of this is more complicated.

It will take a lot of hard work, heavy lifting, and joined up thinking to solve.

So today, we are launching our campaign to Get Britain Working again.

Throughout next year, my Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride, Shadow Business Secretary Andrew Griffith, Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Helen Whately, and I, are going to work together reviewing some of the most challenging and complicated aspects of work and welfare in this country.

And figure out how we can get millions more people into work.

We are going to tackle big questions like: How can we make sure that we have the right incentives so that people are always better off in work?

We will review every circumstance in which benefits are currently 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 than a cap because most people on benefits avoid it through one exemption or another.

Exemptions like being diagnosed with anxiety which can be worth more, than £20,000 to some families.

Quite simply, our sickness benefits system was not designed to handle the age of diagnosis we now live in.

So, we are also going to review which conditions the state treats as disabilities when it comes to benefits.

All of us will have physical and mental challenges at some point in our lives.

But in an age in which one in four people now self-report as disabled, it's clear that we are now going to have to draw a line on what health issues the state can support people with.

This is a review that we will do carefully over time, with medical and employment experts to make sure we get it right.

We want people to get the support they need.

But very often, people should be getting support into work rather than cash payments to sit at home.

The fact is in 2025 with the option of remote working and advances in treatments for many conditions lots of disabled people can and do work.

Conservatives believe that work provides purpose and can improve all lives.

Work, contribution and purpose give you value, dignity. The chance to change your life's circumstances and support the people you care about.

So, we are going to look at what form state support should come in and how long it should last.

And we are going to back businesses who invest in supporting the health of their staff and make it easier for small businesses to adopt some of those good practices without piling more bureaucracy and red tape on them.

Next, we'll do the hard yards on making sure our education system equips people with the skills and attitudes they need for the jobs of our time and for the future.

Instead of thousands of students racking up debt on low value degrees, we are going to boost our apprenticeship system.

Helping young people and sectors of the economy like construction which for too long have relied on migrant labour because we haven't prepared our young people to work in their industry.

And we are going to look in detail at the million young people currently not in education, employment, or training.

Instead of thousands of kids dropping out in their teens because they don't see the point of school, we are going to get them on the path to skills and work.

It's not just young people we're going to help.

We're also going to look at what we can do to get people who have been out of work for years or even decades back into the workforce.

We are also going to look at tax.

How can we make sure we don't have a tax system that crushes people.

People like Ruth.

Our tax system should be encouraging people to start a business, not encouraging them to close their business.

How can we make sure that we have a high growth economy that is not reliant on immigration?

Relying on immigration to boost our economy is a Ponzi scheme.

It is not fair to take talent out of poorer countries while failing to grow our own.

But we're never going to solve that problem unless we look at the fundamentals.

We need to look at what we have been doing, not just for the last year or last five years, but the last 30 and 40 years and start building an economy fit for the future.

Rather than just tweaking the things that we have done in the past.

We need to look at our oil and gas industry.

We need to make sure that we get Britain drilling again.

We need to look at our manufacturing industry.

We need to get Britain building again.

Helen, Andrew, Mel, and I are spearheading the new Conservative Economic Unit.

This new unit. working together. will leave no stone unturned.

And by the time of the next election, we are going to have a detailed plan for how we can embark on a journey to get every single person in Britain who can work, to work.

And we want everyone who can help us on that journey to get involved.

If you're a business, we want you to tell us what is going wrong and what you want us to fix.

Tell us what is wrong so we can get out of the way, and you can create growth.

It is not government that creates jobs, it is business that creates jobs.

If you're someone looking for work, we want to hear what you're struggling with.

What would help you overcome the challenges you're facing.

We need Britain to be one of the best places in the world to start and run a business.

We need to get our wealth creators back from Dubai.

We need young people to see Britain as the place to build something, not as a place to escape from.

Imagine what this will actually look like in communities where no one currently works.

What it will do for our high streets.

What it will do for our public services.

We are going to turn Britain from a welfare state into an opportunity state.

And together, get Britain working again.”