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Ruth Davidson backs UK benefit reforms

Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson.
Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson.

Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson has defended the UK Government’s record on benefit reform, insisting that people should not “just be left to rot on welfare”.

Ms Davidson argued that the Conservatives were “working hard” to get jobless people back into employment.

She said the Tory-led coalition had made “huge inroads” into tackling the UK’s economic problems, but more still needed to be done, including further cuts in benefits.

The Conservatives plan an additional £12 billion of welfare reductions if they win the May 7 election, with Ms Davidson saying this would be “part of a £30 billion package in reducing how much the state spends”.

The Scottish Tory chief told BBC Radio Scotland: “We’re the one party out there that says it’s not good enough to leave people on benefits, we want to do something for you, we want to work hard for people furthest from the labour market.

“In Scotland that’s 30,000 people in the last five years, furthest from the world of work, we got them back into a job.

“So we want to make sure we do reduce the benefits bill but we do it by making sure that people are out there, they’re working, they’ve got pounds in their pockets they’ve earned themselves.”

The party has come under attack from opponents over some of the welfare reforms it has introduced but Ms Davidson said: “Over the last five years we’ve managed to reduce the benefit bill by £21 billion.”

Speaking on the Good Morning Scotland programme, she said: “Let’s remember where we were in 2010, let’s remember the note that we were left that said ‘Sorry, there is no money left’.

“As soon as we came into government, we said we were going to make changes, we were going to rebalance the economy, we were going to get Britons back to work.

“Detractors said we would have unemployment rising to four million. We now have employment at record levels, we’ve created 1.9 million jobs in the last five years.

“The Labour Party said that unemployment would rise. What’s actually happened is we have employment at the highest-ever level, we’ve created more jobs across the UK than the rest of Europe combined.

“I’m not saying that everything in the garden is rosy, far from it, but we’ve made huge inroads to where we were, we’ve increased employment, we’ve brought unemployment down, we’ve got the fastest-growing economy anywhere of any major nation.

“We’ve got people back into work, we’re going to continue doing that, because we don’t believe that people should just be left to rot on welfare.

“They shouldn’t. They should be helped back into a job, building a future for themselves and their family.”