WHAT has defined this Labour government? For many, it happened early on, when one of the new government’s first decisions was to cut winter fuel payments for nearly 10 million pensioners.

We all knew Labour had a tough economic inheritance after 14 years of disastrous policies, but targeting pensioners was wrong — and the row over it dominated Labour conference last year.

As the saying goes, you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. People simply hadn’t voted Labour to take money away from pensioners living on £12,000 a year.

If that was a costly misjudgement, it was compounded this year by the attempt to cut £5 billion from disability benefits. Targeting disabled people showed no lessons had been learned from the winter fuel payments debacle.

It threatened to send into poverty hundreds of thousands of disabled people. Nobody votes Labour to cut benefits. In fact, in 2016, Labour in opposition had defeated similar Conservative attempts to cut £4.5 billion from personal independence payments (PIP).

Social security is personal to our union in multiple ways: around 50,000 of our members work for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) — administering the social security system; tens of thousands of our members also rely on social security to top up their low wages; and finally, thousands of our disabled members claim PIP in order to be able to work at all.

Cutting PIP would likely have driven some disabled people out of the workplace entirely, or at least forced them to cut their hours. And yet ministers were on the TV time after time saying things like, “those who could work should work” to justify cutting PIP.

A month ago, we surveyed our disabled members working across government departments, and many of them were claiming PIP. Over half of them said the benefit was inadequate to meet their needs. It seems more likely to be the case that boosting PIP might help more people into work.

Labour hasn’t just inherited a mess from the Conservative government; it appears to have inherited its allegiance to a punitive system in which benefit claimants need to be sanctioned, harassed or have their benefits cut to incentivise work.

Our members, who work in jobcentres as work coaches dealing face to face with claimants every day, tell a very different story. The DWP’s own research shows sanctions do not help claimants get work. Our members tell us they create barriers between them and the people they serve.

In a major survey of our members working in jobcentres, just 11 per cent said they had enough time working with claimants, and only 14 per cent said they were given enough control over how they interacted with their claimant caseload.

One member told us: “If I had more control of my diary and how I worked, I would be able to tailor support and focus on prioritising the needs of claimants.” This issue for ministers is whether they want to “sound tough” or to be effective? If the latter, they need to listen to the workers, our members.

Just before conference, the new Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden said: “Welfare reform is really important.” We don’t disagree, but for too long, “welfare reform” has been a euphemism for cuts, rather than actual reforms to increase opportunities for claimants.

Any more cuts to social security will be robustly opposed by PCS and other unions. We are happy to discuss genuine reforms that improve people’s dignity, opportunity and living standards.

One welcome change that seems to be coming is the recognition that the two-child limit is, in the words of Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, a “spiteful” policy. PCS has always opposed it, and we look forward to it being removed so that universal credit claims are based on need, not arbitrary caps that impoverish whole families.

Our members remain concerned by the direction of travel, where everything seems to be focused on cuts. The recently announced pension review is another case in point.

PCS opposes any rise in the state pension age, not least because overall life expectancy has stalled under the Conservative government’s years of austerity, and for people on the lowest incomes, it has gone backwards.

Raising the state pension age is especially regressive for workers on low incomes, who are not able to afford to retire early, and are more likely to die at a younger age. Until the government makes significant progress in tackling health inequalities, increases in the state pension age will remain an anti-working-class policy.

Many workers, such as the security guards and cleaners that we represent on outsourced contracts, are simply not capable of doing such physically demanding roles into their late 60s — and that is true for many other workers.

If this government is prepared to work with trade unions and the collective expertise we represent, we can be partners in tackling poverty, increasing well-being and prosperity. But we will robustly oppose any measures that will make working-class people worse off.