This article first appeared in the i Newspaper

It takes a rare political talent to offend and upset so many voters in such a short period of time, but sometimes it’s necessary if you’re going to introduce radical reforms and shake things up a bit.

The trouble for Keir Starmer is that for all the noise he and his ministers have made about reforming the benefits system, the measures announced on Tuesday amounted to something less than a damp squib. Radical, they were not.

Even so, they managed to upset the whole of the powerful disability lobby, and millions of benefit recipients, who thought they were being targeted, even if they weren’t. On top of that, the Government lamentably failed to explain what they were trying to achieve or defend the policies they were announcing.

Liz Kendall, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, seemed to regard the whole thing as an opportunity to bash the Conservatives. Pensions minister Torsten Bell, a former director of the Resolution Foundation think tank, gave a tone-deaf interview with Newsnight’s Victoria Derbyshire, in which he came across as robotic and utterly devoid of empathy, unable to answer the most simple and direct of questions. It was a car-crash interview of epic proportions. He came across as Alan B’Stard on steroids.

This is presumably the same Torsten Bell who, only a year before switching the world of think tank wonkery for being an MP, wrote a column headlined: “It’s immoral to push children into poverty, but that’s what the benefit cap does.”

Bell should have been more honest. These reforms, such as they are, are driven entirely by the need to save money, rather than with a clear vision for improving the benefits system. And even on that, they fail.

The measures announced are intended to save a paltry £5bn a year in 2029 and 2030, in a Department of Work and Pensions annual budget of £276bn. So for all the heat and opposition generated by these reforms, all they have achieved is a tiny saving of the department’s budget by 2030. It’s pathetic. It wasn’t worth the political candle.

Hundreds of thousands of elderly voters have already deserted Labour over the winter fuel allowance shambles. On Tuesday, they lost another tranche of supporters. Losing a few farmers over inheritance tax changes won’t affect electoral arithmetic. Losing a million or so benefit claimants will.

So what else could they have done to save money without losing further support? Personal independence payments (PIP) are a lifeline for many, but once you have been approved for PIP, you get the payment regardless of how much your income is.

My LBC colleague Tom Swarbrick took a call from a listener whose monthly earnings total £6,000. Yet under the rules he was perfectly entitled to claim more than £400 a month of PIP benefits. Disabled people living in relative poverty ought to be fuming about that, as should ordinary taxpayers, because it’s their money that is being abused. Surely there should be an income-related means test in order to be eligible for any disability benefit, or indeed any other?

A second area the Government failed to address was the burgeoning Motability scheme, under which people with disabilities are entitled to a new car every three years in order to help them get about, in exchange for some of their benefits.

In many ways, it is exactly the sort of scheme which should be used to assist people with disabilities in living a full life. Yet it is out of control. Take a second and answer this question before you read on: how many people do you think are in receipt of a Motability vehicle? The answer is a whopping 815,000. That number has increased by an astonishing 170,000 in the last 12 months alone. The value of the Motability fleet is in excess of £14bn.

Motability Operations is the largest single purchaser of cars in the UK. I spoke to one car dealer who told me that 80 per cent of his annual sales were to Motability customers. Nationally, nearly one in five new cars sold falls under the scheme. There appear to be few restrictions on the size of cars that can then be ordered, and then replaced every three years. Insurance, road tax, breakdown cover, servicing, tyre and windscreen costs are all met by the taxpayer, as well as installation costs for home electric charging points.

The whole scheme has become a scam on hard-working taxpayers. And yet Kendall has decided to ignore it, with the inevitable consequence that it will grow and grow, as more and more people realise it’s so easy to take advantage of it.

The reforms announced this week do not hang together, as will be proven once Parliamentary scrutiny commences. And then there will have to be Round Two. Oh dear.