When journalist Camilla Tominey sits down with Aaron Bastani of left-wing outlet Novara Media for a Sunday Showdown debate, the conversation quickly turns to addiction benefits reform and whether PIP payments are helping vulnerable people or quietly making things worse. It is a quieter moment, drawn from personal grief, that cuts closest to the bone.

Tominey recounts watching her mother take child benefit straight from the post office window and into the off-licence. Her mother drank herself to death in 2001. It is not the abstract language of policy she reaches for. It is memory.

“Exactly the same would have happened to my mum,” she says, describing how a close friend of journalist Fraser Nelson allegedly spent his Personal Independence Payment solely on alcohol before dying from chronic alcoholism in Scotland.

The story raises a question that sits uneasily across party lines: when state payments intended to support vulnerable people instead fund the very addiction destroying them, has the system failed at its most fundamental level?

The Scale of the Problem

The figures are hard to ignore. As of January 2025, there were 3.7 million claimants entitled to PIP in England and Wales, a number that has risen steadily year on year. Meanwhile, alcohol harm alone costs society in England an estimated £27.44 billion every year, according to a 2024 calculation by the Institute of Alcohol Studies.

Perhaps most striking is this: according to a parliamentary report by the Committee of Public Accounts, 82% of dependent drinkers in England are not in treatment. Yet alcohol treatment services, when accessed, show success rates of around 60% and deliver an estimated £3 in social benefit for every £1 invested. That is not a failing intervention. It is an underfunded one.

Local authority spending on alcohol and drug services fell by 27% in real terms between 2014 and 2022. The case for redirecting a portion of addiction-related welfare spend toward structured recovery programmes is, at least in economic terms, a compelling one.

“Give People the Means to Catch Fish”

Tominey identifies two distinct problems with the current benefits landscape, and she is careful to separate them.

The first is the disincentive to work. Where benefits exceed average wages, she argues, people struggling with mental health or addiction challenges may find the pull toward employment diminished. Work, she reflects from personal observation of her mother’s better periods, provides structure, a reason to get up, to be presentable, to be functional. That scaffolding matters.

The second is more pointed. Cash payments given to individuals in the grip of addiction can function, in practice, as a direct subsidy to that addiction. The off-licence, not the recovery programme, becomes the destination.

“I’m somebody on the Right who says, give people the means to catch fish, not just throw fish at them,” she says.

It is a position that cuts against the usual caricature of right-wing welfare scepticism. This is not about abandoning vulnerable people. It is about whether the form of support being offered is actually supportive.

Addiction Benefits Reform: What the Current System Gets Wrong

The existing framework for PIP does attempt to account for addiction. Claimants must demonstrate how their condition affects daily living and mobility. Addiction can legally qualify where a person cannot realistically stop drinking to excess because of a medical condition.

But cash payments present an inherent tension. A person in the grip of dependency is, by clinical definition, someone whose capacity for decision-making around their substance of choice is compromised. Handing them unrestricted income and expecting different outcomes is, critics argue, not compassion. It is wishful thinking.

The debate over PIP payments and addiction treatment is not new, but it rarely gets aired with this degree of candour. What Tominey brings is not political theory. It is the quiet authority of someone who watched a parent disappear into a bottle while the state continued to fund the process.

What Recovery-Focused Support Could Look Like

Proponents of change point to models where benefit entitlements for those with diagnosed addiction are channelled directly into residential or community treatment programmes rather than paid as unrestricted cash. This is not about punishment. It is about recognising that for a person in crisis, the most meaningful intervention is access to recovery, not access to funds that deepen dependence.

Structured day programmes, detox support, housing with wraparound care and employment readiness training have all shown measurable outcomes in reducing long-term welfare dependency. Treatment that works also saves money. The £3 return per £1 invested, cited by parliamentary scrutiny, reflects that.

Alcohol treatment services already see 98% of referred patients begin within three weeks. The bottleneck is not availability. It is reaching people before dependency becomes the defining structure of their lives.

A Debate Bigger Than Left and Right

That Tominey raises these concerns in conversation with Bastani, a self-described luxury communist, speaks to the unusual ground this topic occupies. Welfare policy typically maps onto familiar ideological fault lines. But the question of whether cash payments to people with active addictions serve those individuals well is one where the answer does not belong neatly to either side.

A system that genuinely cares about people in addiction does not simply process their payments and move on. It asks what kind of support actually helps. That question deserves honest debate, wherever it leads.

Source: dbrecoveryresources