Tony Blair, Prime Minister "When I look at the welfare state, I don't see a pathway out of poverty, a route to work or a gateway to dignity in retirement. I see a dead end for too many people. I want to clear the way to a new system. The status quo is not an option."

"We will not be that beacon to the world in the year 2005 with a welfare state built for the very different world of 1945."

Gordon Brown, Chancellor "I want a welfare state that is built round the work ethic. Those people capable of working should have both opportunities to work and be encouraged to work."

Peter Lilley, Shadow Chancellor "[Tony Blair] said before the election they were against means testing, now they are talking in terms of means testing even the universal and contributory benefits."

Gordon Brown, 1996 "Anybody who believes we are going to modernise the welfare state without making tough choices is of course wrong. This is not what new Labour is about."

Peter Lilley, 1993 "[There is] no reason in principle why people should not opt to make provision for themselves privately rather than through the state system."

Gordon Brown "The greatest waste of our economic potential and the most serious cause of poverty is unemployment, denying opportunity to 3.5 million working-age households."

Tony Blair "If all the Government does is simply increase the amount of money in the basic state pension, many of the poorest people don't benefit from that at all."

Gordon Brown "We should make work pay more than benefits for those capable and able to work."

Harriet Harman, Social Security Secretary "The way that social security is delivered at the moment is resented by the public who pay for it, the clients who use it, and the staff who run it. For many people, the current system is fragmented, reactive, inflexible and confusing."

Frank Field, Social Security Minister "[Local autonomy allows money to be shifted in] whatever is thought to be the right way of moving from welfare dependency to creating opportunities. There is no way under the present set up where that can happen."

Lone parents

Harriet Harman, November 1996 "The way to get lone mothers out of poverty and cut spending on benefits for them is not by cutting the amount on which they have to live year by year and plunging them further into poverty."

"The proposals to cut the benefits of lone parents while giving them no help to get work are wrong, and we will oppose them. In Government, we will have a welfare-to-work approach for lone parents. We cannot sort out the £10 billion benefit bill for lone parents by shaving their benefits bit by bit."

Harriet Harman, November 1997 "These benefit cuts have been a hard choice, but they are Tory cuts and we have to implement them to stay within our manifesto commitment to keep within spending limits."

Iain Duncan Smith, Conservative Shadow Social Security Secretary "Labour knew, when they announced before the General Election that they would stick to Conservative spending plans, that this would mean making cuts to lone parents' benefits. Yet both Tony Blair and Harriet Harman publicly stated in the weeks running up to the General Election that they would not make cuts to lone parents' benefits. They wouldn't admit this before the General Election for fear of losing votes."

Ken Livingstone, Labour MP "If these cuts go through they will be one of the most despicable acts ever in the history of Labour Governments ... even if my life depended on it I couldn't vote for it."

Anne Clwyd, Labour MP "I have been shocked by the scale of the cuts. Some of them - like taking away industrial injury benefits from retired miners and factory workers - are really mean and I expected a Labour government to reverse them, not to continue to follow Tory policies."

Alice Mahon, Labour MP "This is totally unacceptable. These are Tory cuts being implemented by a Labour government."

Clive Soley, Chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party "We cannot just watch people sink or swim while we build a new welfare state designed to increase independence and raising living standards through work."

Disability

Ken Livingstone "Disabled people want to work, like single mothers do if they get the chance. But for the vast majority of these people, work is not going to be an option."

Simon Burns, Conservative Social Security spokesman "The chaos in Government over benefits will frighten many vulnerable people."

David Rendel, Liberal Democrat Social Security spokesman "The Government appears to be threatening some of the most disadvantaged with even greater disadvantages.

Maternity benefit

Harriet Harman "For the most highly paid women, there's no ceiling on the amount they get, and in one case, if you earn £1 million a year, you can actually get £18,000 a week from the social security system."

Dianne Abbott, Labour MP "I support the idea of a wider debate on reform, but I am worried that one casualty of New Labour's welfare reforms will be rights for women. If the Government stops paying maternity benefit, employers are not going to take on female workers."

Age Concern "Any notion of affluence tests is a means test by another name, and as we have a contributory pension system it would be contrary to its spirit to deny anyone a state pension."
 

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