Verdicts · Welfare
What the UK thinks about welfare
Settled referendums
55
since Jun 2026
Votes cast
7,534
all time, on welfare
This week
583
votes · 1 referendums settled
Written opinions
344
all time, left by voters
This week's opinion highlightThe most respected opinion this week
“The triple lock is there to protect against inflation. Control inflation and you control the cost of pensions. Blaming the triple lock is just taking the easy route and is terrible political optics of kicking the most vulnerable because you're too lazy and stupid to do anything more complicated like controlling inflation.”
constancia, debating No on “Should the pension triple lock be scrapped to ease financial pressure from recent surge in bond yields?” · read the thread →
6
Respects
Most respected on welfare this week
- 1.constancia6 respects
- 2.TheresaWatt205 respects
- 3.HardCompact5 respects
- 4.BenL5 respects
- 5.rjane5 respects
Who answered this week
The 587 placed voters lean Centre Right overall.
H. Left5%
Left18%
C. Left8%
Centre6%
C. Right9%
Right45%
H. Right8%
Regions this week
South EastC. Right
ScotlandCentre
LondonCentre
South WestC. Right
North WestC. Right
East of EnglandC. Right
YorkshireCentre
North EastC. Right
East MidlandsCentre
West MidlandsC. Right
WalesC. Right
Northern IrelandRight
Votes each week
583so far this week
86927 Jul
6153 Aug
24610 Aug
90417 Aug
1,27624 Aug
58331 Aug
All-time welfare highlights
Biggest landslide
YES 87%
Should England reform its adult social care system even if it requires difficult decisions?
87% of 151 votes went the same way.
Closest result
NO 51%
Should the Motability scheme exclude larger-engined vehicles over 1000cc?
Decided by 3 votes.
Most debated
NO 57%
Should the pension triple lock be scrapped to ease financial pressure from recent surge in bond yields?
46 written opinions.
This week
1 settled · 583 votes
0% NO
Majority against
YES 43%
583 votes
0 skipped
by @refnation⏱ Ended 3 Sept 2026
Should the pension triple lock be scrapped to ease financial pressure from recent surge in bond yields?
The verdict
A promise to pensioners was treated as a red line, not a line item: No won decisively, while the strongest voices in the room cast fiscal pressure as an excuse to raid an already inadequate safety net.
Last week
4 settled · 1,276 votes
0% NO
Majority against
YES 40%
383 votes
0 skipped
by @RichardEggleston⏱ Ended 27 Aug 2026
Should the UK introduce universal basic income while keeping targeted benefits like disability and housing support?
The verdict
“We cant afford our current handout culture,” said the floor’s strongest No voice. No won decisively, and the room’s winning argument was about cost and work, while Yes offered the more expansive social promise.
0% YES
Majority for
NO 41%
307 votes
0 skipped
by @Jim⏱ Ended 24 Aug 2026
Should inheritance tax be abolished?
The verdict
“It's legalised grave robbery” was the Yes side’s sharpest cry, but the chamber delivered a more measured verdict: abolition won amid a debate really about fairness, not just tax.
0% YES
Majority for
NO 26%
294 votes
0 skipped
by @Mark19⏱ Ended 23 Aug 2026
Is Robert Jenrick right that long-term welfare harms young people rather than supporting them?
The verdict
The floor’s sharpest line came from the losing side: “Blaming the safety net confuses the symptom with the disease.” Yes nevertheless won nearly three to one, with its supporters treating long-term dependency as the central harm.
0% YES
Majority for
NO 47%
292 votes
0 skipped
by @DavidSandilands⏱ Ended 23 Aug 2026
Should in-work benefits be replaced with a higher minimum wage?
The verdict
“Taxpayers shouldn’t subsidise profitable businesses paying poverty wages” was the floor’s best-rated line; it carried a narrow Yes verdict, even as No voters supplied more of the room’s running commentary.
Every welfare verdict
- NO 57%Should the pension triple lock be scrapped to ease financial pressure from recent surge in bond yields?A promise to pensioners was treated as a red line, not a line item: No won decisively, while the strongest voices in the room cast fiscal pressure as an excuse to raid an already inadequate safety net.
- NO 60%Should the UK introduce universal basic income while keeping targeted benefits like disability and housing support?“We cant afford our current handout culture,” said the floor’s strongest No voice. No won decisively, and the room’s winning argument was about cost and work, while Yes offered the more expansive social promise.
- YES 59%Should inheritance tax be abolished?“It's legalised grave robbery” was the Yes side’s sharpest cry, but the chamber delivered a more measured verdict: abolition won amid a debate really about fairness, not just tax.
- YES 74%Is Robert Jenrick right that long-term welfare harms young people rather than supporting them?The floor’s sharpest line came from the losing side: “Blaming the safety net confuses the symptom with the disease.” Yes nevertheless won nearly three to one, with its supporters treating long-term dependency as the central harm.
- YES 53%Should in-work benefits be replaced with a higher minimum wage?“Taxpayers shouldn’t subsidise profitable businesses paying poverty wages” was the floor’s best-rated line; it carried a narrow Yes verdict, even as No voters supplied more of the room’s running commentary.
- YES 80%Should UK spending be refocused on investment in infrastructure and services instead of working-age benefits levels?“Providing benefits builds nothing,” argued the floor’s strongest Yes voice; the chamber backed refocusing spending, decisively, but the sharpest objection said the choice was false.
- NO 69%1.3 million foreign nationals claim universal credit in the UK, is this fair?The floor’s sharpest Yes case was that “Eligibility for universal credit is not based on people's nationality”; the room still turned away, leaving a decisive verdict more blunt than the arguments that earned the most respect.
- YES 62%Should those that have been out of work for a year be forced to do 20 hours community service?Yes won, but the chamber’s sharpest voices were on the losing side, warning that unpaid work without real jobs would be “performative cruelty”.
- YES 57%Should welfare benefits for working-age claimants be cut?The chamber backed cuts to working-age welfare, even as the floor’s sharpest No voice warned: “Out of work benefits are already way below minimum wage.”
- YES 66%Should no one have to sell their home to pay for social care?A home was treated less as an inheritance than as a boundary no illness should cross, and Yes carried the vote. The sharpest disagreement was over whether social care is a shared insurance scheme or a private obligation.
- NO 51%Should the Motability scheme exclude larger-engined vehicles over 1000cc?A near-draw produced a clear enough verdict: No narrowly prevailed, while the floor’s strongest argument said the scheme should test genuine need rather than engine size.
- YES 87%Should England reform its adult social care system even if it requires difficult decisions?Nearly nine in ten of the 151 who voted backed reform, but almost nobody on the winning side agreed on what it should look like — a consensus on the diagnosis, not the cure.
- YES 54%Should people with incomes over £35,000 repay their Winter Fuel Payment through the tax system?A narrow win for clawing back the Winter Fuel Payment from better-off pensioners masks a chamber where the losing side supplied nearly all the argument, four of five opinions posted came from No voters, yet Yes still carried it 86 to 73.
- YES 58%Should welfare certified farmers be allowed to bypass council planning permission and build on their own property?A modest win for deregulation carried less by weight of argument than by weight of numbers: the chamber's single most respected opinion came from the Yes side, but the No camp actually left more opinions on the page, and still lost by sixteen points.
- NO 51%Should the government introduce a wealth tax to fund adult social care reform in England?A near dead-even split concealed a lopsided argument: almost every voice on the page came from the side that won, leaving the case for a wealth tax to fund social care reform barely made at all, as No prevailed 74 to 71.
- NO 51%Would you pay a 1.8% levy on your earnings to pay for a National Care Service?A near dead heat on Andy Burnham's care levy split not on whether social care needs money but on whether the state deserves more of the public's, with No edging it by the barest of margins as voters demanded efficiency before tax rises.
- YES 63%Should the UK make benefits harder to claim by increasing conditions for young people?Nearly two in three votes backed tightening benefit conditions for young people, yet not a single word in the debate spoke up for tightening them — every opinion left on the page argued the opposite case.
- NO 60%Should we scrap the state pension triple lock?The chamber's arithmetic case lost to its comparison case: three in five voters kept the triple lock, unmoved by warnings about an unpayable bill once the argument turned to how little UK pensioners get compared with the rest of Europe.
- YES 61%Should the tax and benefits systems be fully integrated so welfare payments are reduced by income tax?Three in five voters backed folding welfare into the tax system, but the chamber's sharpest complaint was about fairness upward, not just downward — taxing benefits only bites if the same net is thrown over accountants and offshore schemes.
- YES 68%Should England create a National Care Service that operates on NHS principles?The chamber that will actually need care backed it hardest: voters over 65 supported a National Care Service on NHS principles by nine to one, as the floor overall endorsed Andy Burnham's plan two to one, leaving the funding question conspicuously unresolved.
Show all 55 verdicts ↓
- YES 69%Should the government expand wraparound childcare funding for service families?Retention, not sentiment, was the subtext here: a chamber otherwise split down the middle by gender closed ranks two to one behind extending wraparound childcare for service families, treating it less as a welfare perk than as the price of keeping people in uniform.
- NO 55%Is it time to suspend all benefits and have all claimants reevaluated?A blunt proposal to switch off the whole benefits system and start again fell narrowly short, with No prevailing by ten points, but the chamber's arithmetic scrambled the usual generational script: it was the 35-44s, not the young or the pensioners, who backed suspension most emphatically, while every other age band pulled the other way. That inversion is the real finding here. Voters in their thirties and early forties — often the group squeezed hardest by tax and childcare costs while feeling furthest from needing state support themselves — swung decisively for a reset, whereas the youngest cohort and the 45-54s, closer to the sharp end of PIP delays or caring responsibilities, resisted it hardest. Men edged narrowly toward suspension, women leaned away, but neither gap approached the scale of that age anomaly, suggesting this was less a simple left-right split than a divide between those who feel they're subsidising a system and those who fear becoming its casualty. The vote lands squarely on the fault line opposition figures have been working since the pandemic-era claims surge — fraud, face-to-face assessments, work conditionality — against a government wary of the "administrative errors and hardship" its own reassessment drive keeps generating. That the chamber split so close to even, on a policy as drastic as suspending all payments outright, shows how far the argument for a harder reset has travelled into mainstream welfare debate, even where it doesn't quite win. The floor's two most-respected voices captured the poles precisely. The Yes case argued baldly that "apart from the most extreme cases of disability, benefits are just encouraging a society of dependant losers," while the top-rated No response dismissed the fraud premise itself, telling Yes voters "the world is not replete with people fulfilling your bizarre conspiratorial fantasy of co-ordinated fraud." A near-even split on stopping every payment in the country tells you the argument isn't about to go away, whichever side of forty you happen to be on.
- YES 61%Should the government cut DWP benefits to tackle the rising welfare bill?Voters here backed cuts to the DWP benefits bill by a solid but not overwhelming margin, with those in their prime working years the most convinced and the youngest cohort the most resistant, in a chamber that split three to two for Yes.
- YES 58%Should anyone getting an unemployment benefit be required to carry out community tasks such as litter picking?The chamber backed mandatory litter-picking for benefit claimants by a clear if not overwhelming margin, but the age pattern scrambles the usual welfare script: it was the youngest voters, the group closest to the claimant experience, who recoiled from it, while pensioners and those in their prime working years backed it most firmly.
- YES 84%Should the UK overhaul the PIP disability benefits system?Voters here backed an overhaul of PIP by a wide margin — 97 to 19 — suggesting little faith that the current disability benefits system, as the Timms review found, is fit for purpose, even as the scale of consensus leaves Burnham's government scant political cover for a Guardian-style "progressive" rebuild that avoids being read as cuts by stealth.
- NO 55%Should the health element of universal credit be cut for new claimants?A vote that split less on ideology than on generation, with the chamber narrowly rejecting the cut but scrambling the usual welfare battle lines along the way — 35-44s backing the two-tier system three to one while their elders on either side recoiled from it.
- NO 62%Over time, should National Insurance contributions be increased to fund a lowering of the retirement age?The chamber's rejection of higher National Insurance to buy back a lower retirement age, by three to one, cuts against the very generation you might expect to champion it: the 55-64s, closest to the state pension line themselves, voted down the trade-off almost two to one.
- YES 70%Should the PIP system be tightened to prevent awards for conditions with limited impact on daily life?A clear two-to-one majority backed tightening PIP eligibility, with the sharpest resistance coming not from the young claimants often blamed for rising anxiety-related awards but from the youngest voters themselves, who split against reform.
- YES 67%Should the government introduce the Adult Social Care Fair Pay Agreement with annual negotiations on pay and conditions?Two-thirds backing for a state-brokered pay deal for care workers masks a striking gender split: men embraced the Fair Pay Agreement by roughly seven in ten, while women — who make up the overwhelming majority of the care workforce itself — tilted against it, the chamber's 78-38 verdict built almost entirely on male enthusiasm.
- YES 58%Should the government reduce social security spending by tackling problems in jobs, health and housing rather than cutting benefits?The chamber backed the softer, root-causes route to welfare reform — 63 to 45, a clear if not landslide preference for mending jobs, health and housing over cutting benefit rates outright.
- NO 53%Should pensioners continue receiving the State Pension triple lock?A pledge built to protect pensioners from politics fell narrowly to the very generation approaching retirement, with the triple lock's guarantee against inflation and wage stagnation losing by a slim six points as the near-retired and working-age middle turned against it.
- NO 54%Should the two-child benefit cap be scrapped?Scrapping the two-child cap failed to find a majority even among a chamber narrowly split down the middle, with the closest thing to consensus being that nobody was terribly sure — the tightest age band, the 45-54s, broke for reform while the largest, the over-55s, dug in hardest against it, no group moving with real conviction either way.
- YES 58%Should the UK Gov buy an index linked fund at birth for each person?A generational line rather than a class one decided this: the young and middle-aged backed a sovereign baby-bond model that would only pay off decades hence, while those closer to retirement, who would never see it, shrugged it off — voters here backed the idea 58 to 42.
- YES 63%Should the Country have a National Care Service and funding be general taxation?A clear national-taxation mandate emerged, with yes carrying nearly two to one, but the vote split sharply by gender in a way that cuts against the usual assumption that women, as the majority of both care recipients and unpaid carers, would be the natural champions of a state-run system.
- YES 86%Should the government introduce a Value for Money framework requiring pension schemes to publish performance ratings?Rare consensus on pensions, with the chamber backing red-to-green performance ratings by roughly six to one, and barely a flicker of the tribal splits that usually attend welfare reform.
- YES 69%Should NHS Continuing Healthcare funding be reformed to reduce local council overspend?The chamber backed reform of NHS Continuing Healthcare funding by more than two to one, but the one group most likely to be drawing a state pension proved no more sceptical than anyone else — it was the 45-54s, midlife and often on the sharp end of both work and care duties, who alone split down the middle.
- YES 55%Should the UK introduce six weeks of well-paid paternity leave for fathers?The narrowest of mandates for six weeks' paid paternity leave conceals a generational chasm: 25-34s, the age group actually having babies now, backed it almost unanimously, while every under-25 voter here said no.
- YES 72%Should the UK government replace Personal Independence Payment with a new disability benefit?Rare consensus on a welfare question: nearly three in four voters here backed scrapping PIP for a new disability benefit, with the old and young most convinced and only the small female sample genuinely split.
- YES 60%Should the government increase the auto-enrolment minimum contribution to 8% of all earnings?Voters here backed a higher pension squeeze on their own pay packets by three to two, with the strongest enthusiasm from the 25-34s who have decades left to feel the deduction and the least from those already mid-career.
- NO 67%Should free childcare be extended to parents on benefits?Two to one against extending free childcare to parents on benefits, but the real split was generational: the youngest voters backed the idea, the middle-aged rejected it almost outright, and the chamber only came together once it went past 65.
- YES 53%Is removing the supported housing benefit cliff edge the right way to encourage residents into work?On a question this close, the generations split hardest: young voters overwhelmingly rejected smoothing the benefit cliff edge, while those in their prime working years backed it strongly enough to carry Yes to a narrow national win.
- YES 76%Should people with mild ADHD be stopped from claiming disability benefits?On a question tailor-made to split generations against each other, the chamber instead closed ranks: three in four backed stripping mild ADHD claimants of disability benefits, with only the 25-34s showing real hesitation.
- YES 60%Should the government tighten daily living assessments for new PIP claimants?Support for tightening PIP assessments rose steadily with age, from a coin-toss among the under-35s to near-unanimity among the over-65s, while men backed the change decisively and women split down the middle.
- YES 60%Should minimum workplace pension contributions be raised to increase retirement savings?A future-tax-yourself question split the chamber less by generation than logic might suggest, with only the near-retired 65+ crowd firmly convinced, while voters approaching pension age themselves stayed evenly torn on paying more in now for more later.
- NO 52%Is universal basic income the solution to increasing automation and AI?Nearly a dead heat on UBI conceals a jagged age pattern that has nothing to do with generation: the young mostly said no, the 45-54s and over-65s said yes, and the 55-64s dug in hardest against it.
- YES 59%Should the lower qualifying earnings threshold for pension auto-enrolment be removed?A modest win for extending auto-enrolment down to the lowest earners masked a generational dip: it was the youngest and the near-retired who backed it, while workers in their late thirties and early forties, presumably watching their own payslips shrink, pushed back hardest.
- YES 53%Should England extend 30 hours of funded childcare per week to working parents from when their child is 9 months old?A wafer-thin win for extending 30 funded childcare hours to 9-month-olds, carried by parents of prime childcare age and rejected by those past it — a generational bookend, not a consensus.
- NO 53%Should the government increase child benefit by £2500 per year for 0-2 year olds and introduce £7000 childcare vouchers for 3-4 year olds?No won a narrow contest, 27 votes to 24, and the closeness masked a sharp age divide: parents-in-waiting or in the thick of it backed the plan, older cohorts spending it rejected it.
- YES 73%Should welfare benefits be reformed to prioritise employment support over unconditional payments?Voters here backed conditional welfare reform by a landslide, 73-27, with the sharpest resistance concentrated among 25-34s, who split just 64-36 while every other sizeable age group ran hotter for reform.
- NO 54%Should the two-child benefit cap be scrapped?No won narrowly — 37 to 32, an 8-point margin that leaves the cap standing but far from settled, with the middle-aged least sympathetic and the 55-64s bucking the trend.
- YES 54%Should the government remove VAT relief from some new Motability leases?A narrow 54-46 win for stripping VAT relief from some Motability leases, but the coalition behind it was generational: 25-34s were the only clear holdouts, everyone from 35 upward leaned Yes.
- YES 61%Should the government get rid of the state pension triple lock (move to inflation linked only)?Voters here backed scrapping the triple lock 61-39, but the topline hides a generational cliff: 90% of 25-34s (18 of 20) wanted it gone, while every 45-54-year-old who voted (4 of 4) said keep it.
- YES 65%Should Labour proceed with the Pension Schemes Act reforms regardless of any leadership change?Yes carried it 13-7, a solid but not overwhelming 65%, on a small chamber where the only real resistance clustered among the 25-34s and the over-45s.
- YES 58%Should the government introduce an emergency brake on welfare spending?YES carried it 25-18 (58%), but the win was built on the smaller, older segment of the chamber — under-35s split dead even, while every over-35 voter with a profile backed the brake.
- NO 52%Should eligibility for personal independence payment be restricted for some mental health conditions?No won by the narrowest of margins, 22 votes to 20, on a question that split the chamber almost evenly down the middle rather than along the usual generational lines.