The Labour MPs raking it in as they slash benefits

Liz Kendall was unsuccessful in her bid to be Labour leader (Pic: Wikimedia commons)

Labour MPs are planning to cut billions from the welfare budget while they rake in the cash.

Work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall lives in a £4 million Victorian mansion in Notting Hill, west London. She bought the property with her partner, the banker James Ind, four years ago.

The pair’s combined salary is an estimated to be around £760,000. Kendall takes home a £67,505 ministerial salary in addition to her £91,346 MP’s salary. Ind’s pay packet is thought to be around £600,000.

Ind was a pupil at £52,000-a-year Eton College and now works as “global head of multi-asset solutions” at Santander Asset Management.

Kendall also claims costs for a second property she rents in her Leicester West constituency. The most recent documents held by the Commons show she claimed a total of £3,810 in energy costs for five months, with the largest monthly bills totalling £352. 

Last November, Kendall axed the annual winter fuel payment of between £100 and £300 for all but the poorest pensioners. This cut will force 100,000 pensioners into poverty by 2027.

In 2015 Kendall stood for the leadership of the Labour Party. She finished fourth with just 4.5 percent of the vote.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting has taken £175,000 from companies and individuals linked to private health firms, according to the MPs’ register of interests.

Research by the Good Law Project shows that these account for more than 60 percent of Streeting’s donations since he entered parliament in 2015.

According to the electoral commission, the largest contribution to Streeting’s political project has come from MPM Connect and OPD Group Ltd. They have given the Ilford North MP a total of £144,900.

These two companies are controlled by Peter Hearn, who also invested a further £40,000 in Streeting in a personal capacity. Hearn is a recruitment executive whose firms work with “senior NHS executive recruitment and help private healthcare providers recruit healthcare professionals”.

Streeting also accepted a total of £65,000 from John Armitage, a hedge fund manager with more than £550 million invested in UnitedHealth, the largest private health insurer in the world.

The health secretary has also taken £13,500 from Sir Trevor Chinn, a senior advisor to a firm holding investments in several private health companies, and £13,000 from Kevin Craig, whose political consultancy advises a Swiss-French firm that provides temporary staff to the NHS.

Wes Streeting has also received nearly £30,000 from Britain’s powerful pro-Israel lobby. Two years ago, Streeting became the first member of Keir Starmer’s shadow cabinet to visit Israel.

The £4,700 trip was paid for by Labour Friends of Israel (LFI), who also paid for Sarah Harrison, a member of Streeting’s staff, to visit Israel with him. In 2021, Streeting received £5,000 from Red Capital to pay for staff in his office. The company is owned by former LFI chair Jonathan Mendelsohn.

Mendelsohn is also the director of Europa Healthcare Group, which has fed off NHS privatisation.

Torsten Bell is the new under secretary of state for pensions. He admitted on BBC Newsnight that he could not live on disability benefits because he “has a mortgage to pay”.

Bell was educated at The Judd School, a grammar school in Tonbridge, Kent. He studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Mansfield College, Oxford.

He was a special adviser to Blairite Labour chancellor Alistair Darling before becoming head of policy under the Labour leader Ed Miliband.

Bell spent a decade as director of the Resolution Foundation think tank where he argued for pension “reform”, such as ditching the triple lock which ensures pensions rise in line with inflation or wage increases.

In May 2024, Bell was parachuted in as Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Swansea West, despite the objections of local activists.

Bell supports axing disability benefits. But the think tank he used to run has slammed the cuts, saying that any “tiny gains” in universal credit payments, “are overshadowed by reforms that risk causing major income losses for those who are too ill to work or those who no longer qualify for disability benefits.”

Labour MPs like Kendall, Streeting and Bell are out of touch with how ordinary people live. Unions need to get on the front foot and organise a fightback against their cuts.