Labour knows it needs to be more like Martin Lewis

Ava Santina, The Independent

Early in Keir Starmer’s premiership, Labour launched a national programme to teach young children how to brush their teeth properly. Tooth decay is the leading cause of hospital admissions among children aged five to nine, and figures showed over 20 per cent of five-year-olds had received treatment, presumably at enormous taxpayer expense. They even scored a partnership with Colgate-Palmolive, which committed to donate 23 million toothbrushes and toothpastes over the next five years.

It was received poorly by opposition politicians and commentators. “Labour seems to think that no parent can be trusted to brush their children’s teeth,” said Conservative MP Victoria Atkins. Her colleague Miriam Cates suggested they’d be “disempowering parents and robbing them of their rightful responsibilities”, while GB News lambasted the initiative as “nanny-state Britain”.

But when I actually spoke to my teacher friends and family, they were all remarkably positive about the scheme. Obviously, it’s a pain to teach a child about oral health, but the wider impact is preventative healthcare that saves the NHS in the long run. This is Martin Lewis economics: fix the small things, and the big things will look after themselves. By teaching children to brush their teeth, you can reduce inequalities, potentially reduce pressure on NHS dentists and emergency rooms and, ultimately, save some money.

Labour knows it needs more Martin Lewis style thinking. It’s perhaps why he was seen walking into Number 11 on the morning of the Budget last week. His philosophy? If we want to keep the economy just above water, the cheapest way to deal with a crisis is often to prevent it happening in the first place.

Take the big problem with people who are a little older than those who need help brushing their teeth. Nearly a million “youngsters”, to lean into chancellor John Healey’s phrase, are not in education, employment or training. And it’s costing the taxpayer a lot of money, with roughly half of them claiming out-of-work benefits that are mostly health related.

The Tory peer Lord Evans of Rainow ridiculed these “youngsters” in the House of Lords as “too fragile to cope with the rigours of working” arguing that the current system was “facilitating the internalisation of a victim narrative in the young”. But let’s drill a little deeper into the figures: data from NHS England shows an astonishing median wait time of 304 days for a first contact, with some patients reporting up to 976. That’s two and a half years to speak to someone about poor mental health. The longer young people are left without the mental health support they need, the more expensive the consequences become, both for the individual and the public purse. It’s Martin Lewis economics again: treat a problem when it’s a small thing to stop it becoming a big thing later.

The problem is that the system to reach people early is broken. A male friend of mine put it best: you’re encouraged to reach out, even the Mayor of London has run campaigns about reaching out, but if you pluck up the gall to ask for help, you’re told to wait. So you wait. And wait. And by the time your turn finally comes, you may be in a far worse place than when you first reached out. His claim is evidenced by the Care Quality Commission's 2026 report, that found 67 per cent of community mental-health patients who waited more than six months said their mental health deteriorated while waiting.

This leads to an enormous number of people dumped onto DWP in the interim and awarded a stipend while they wait for their call up, and it doesn’t matter how many times Kemi Badenoch says it, more in-person assessment meetings won’t miraculously solve the problem, in fact it could even balloon the bill with each in-person assessment costing £282, according to the National Audit Office.

Both Reform and Conservative have projected they could save around £9 billion per year by removing the mental health PIP payments. The fundamental weakness in this approach is an assumption that removing financial support will translate into people returning to employment. The government's own research shows that amongst the people receiving health and disability benefits, 41 per cent are waiting for NHS treatment, half say their ability to work depends on receiving that treatment, and nearly half believe their health will prevent them from ever returning to work. The DWP's own analysis finds no demonstrated direct relationship between removing PIP from someone with anxiety and getting them into a job.

Given Martin Lewis has previously been vocal in his opposition to cuts to disability benefits, it is hardly difficult to imagine what he'd make of scrapping PIP outright. Research by his Money and Mental Health Policy Institute found that nearly two-thirds of working PIP recipients would have to reduce their hours or leave work altogether if they lost the payment. In other words, take away the financial support that helps people stay in employment and you risk making them less able to work, not more.

Labour's 2024 general election manifesto made a number of significant promises on mental health. Its central argument was that it should be treated with the same reverence as physical health, with earlier intervention, more support for children and young people, and shorter NHS waiting times. So it needs to stick to its side of the bargain, and deliver.