Peter Bedford MP is Shadow Pensions Minister.

For me, the welfare debate has never been abstract.

I was raised by a single mother, alongside two younger brothers. One of them has severe physical and mental disabilities. I know what it is to watch a parent juggle the bills at the kitchen table. I know what it is to see a brother who needs care around the clock, and a mother who does everything she can to provide it.

For families like mine, welfare was a lifeline. I will never forget that.

But growing up taught me something else too. Where you start in life does not decide where you finish. I started working in my early teens, because if I wanted anything, I had to earn it. That taught me the value of a pay packet and the pride of standing on your own two feet. It also taught me a simple truth: if you aspire and you work hard, you can achieve anything.

It has been the honour of my life to be elected as the Member of Parliament for Mid Leicestershire. I say that not to boast, but because I believe that path should be open to every child in this country, wherever they start.

My answer to where we start is simple. Welfare should help those in the most genuine need. The disabled child. The carer who gives up work to look after someone they love. The worker who loses their job and needs support to get back on their feet. A compassionate country stands behind those people, and it should do so without hesitation.

But welfare in Britain today has drifted a long way from that purpose. For too many, it has become a cost of living subsidy.

The numbers are stark. This year the welfare bill is forecast to rise by £19 billion, to around £353 billion. The Office for Budget Responsibility warns that sickness and disability benefits could reach £100 billion a year before the end of this decade. We already spend more on health and disability benefits than we do on defending our country.

Behind the numbers sits something more worrying than cost. It is a culture. A culture where people feel they should claim as much as possible, not because they need it, but because “him down the road gets it.”

That culture is corrosive. It erodes aspiration, the very thing that makes a society strong. When the system rewards claiming over working, it tells young people the ladder is not worth climbing. That is not compassion. It is the opposite.

I do not blame the individual who looks at the system and takes what it offers. I blame a system that has lost sight of its purpose, and a Government that lost its nerve when it had the chance to fix it. Faced down by its own backbenchers, Labour’s climbdown was so complete that the Institute for Fiscal Studies said its watered-down reforms would deliver no savings over the next four years. Even then, 49 Labour MPs voted against them. And Downing Street still will not set a timetable for getting the welfare bill down.

Last year almost £10 billion was overpaid through fraud and error. That is money that should be going to those in genuine need.

More than a million young people are now not in education, employment or training. Six in ten of them have never had a job. That is aspiration wasted. That is potential lost.

Meanwhile, the definition of disability has been stretched so far that it now lets down the very people it was meant to protect. It is unfair on those who get up early, go out to work and pay for the system through their taxes. Most of all, it is unfair on those in genuine need. When the definition is drawn so wide, support is spread too thin. Every pound that goes on a loosely defined claim is a pound not spent on the family caring for a disabled child, or on the person who truly cannot work.

Conservatives believe compassion and aspiration are not opposites. A good welfare system catches you when you fall and then helps you back up. It makes sure work always pays. It treats people as capable of more, not as permanent claimants.

I know what welfare can do for a family in need, because it did it for mine. That is exactly why I will not stand by while it is stretched into something it was never meant to be.

So my challenge to the Government is this. Will it have the courage to give welfare back its true purpose? Or will it leave the next generation believing that claiming is easier than climbing?